We have free will. We can choose. And the potential for tragedy is a necessary consequence of that freedom. It is a burden we must carry to be free, that we may fall.

This is the oldest claim in the Western tradition and one of the hardest to keep in view. The hardness is not intellectual. The argument is not complicated. The hardness is that the claim asks something of us that we would rather not give, which is the steady acknowledgment that the conditions of every good we love are also the conditions of every loss we fear, and that we cannot have the first without the second. The wish that we could is the deepest and most common wish a human being can have. It is also the wish that, when granted, destroys us.

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The Greeks knew this. They built their tragedies around it. Sophocles wrote a play about a man named Oedipus who was free, who chose, whose choices were the choices of a man of integrity, and whose integrity destroyed his house. Oedipus is not a fool. Oedipus is not a villain. Oedipus is a king who, presented with a plague, tries to discover its cause. He is told the cause. He follows the evidence. He refuses to look away. He does, at every step, what a serious person would do. And the doing, performed by a man free to do otherwise, brings down upon him and upon his family a catastrophe so complete that the play’s last lines warn the audience to call no man happy until he has crossed the boundary of his life free of pain.

The Greeks did not write this play because they thought freedom was a mistake. They wrote it because they thought freedom was the truth about what kind of creature a human being is, and they wanted the city to look at the truth without flinching. To be the kind of creature that can choose is to be the kind of creature that can be destroyed by its own choices. The two are not separable. A creature that could not be destroyed by its choices would not be making choices. It would be following a script. And the dignity of being human is precisely that we are not following a script — that the choices are ours, that the integrity is ours, that the catastrophe, when it comes, is ours also.

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The mistake that runs through the modern centuries, in every form they have taken, is the wish to grant the first without the second. The wish to have freedom without the possibility of falling. The wish to have love without the possibility of loss. The wish to construct a world in which the goods we cherish are guaranteed, and the costs of cherishing them are eliminated, and the human creature is finally safe from the consequences of being the kind of creature it is.

This wish has names. It has been called perfection, and progress, and the end of history, and salvation by other means. It has powered revolutions and built empires and animated the manifestos of thinkers who believed that the right arrangement of human affairs would, at last, abolish the conditions that had produced human suffering. None of these projects has succeeded. All of them have failed in the same way. They have failed because the conditions they sought to abolish were not separable from the conditions they sought to preserve. The freedom and the falling, the love and the loss, the choice and the consequence — these are not pairs of independent variables that can be optimized one at a time. They are the same condition under different descriptions, and any project that abolishes one abolishes the other.

A world without the possibility of loss is a world without the possibility of love. A world without the possibility of falling is a world without the possibility of standing. A world without the possibility of tragedy is a world without the possibility of meaning. And the project of constructing such a world, however nobly it begins, ends in the same place every time, because the only way to abolish the possibility of human failure is to abolish the conditions of human freedom, and the only way to abolish the conditions of human freedom is to take from human beings the capacities by which they are themselves. The perfect utopia and the perfect tyranny are not distant cousins. They are the same arrangement under two names. The utopian promises that no one will ever suffer again, and the tyrant promises that no one will ever choose again, and the two promises describe the same world.

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This is why romance does not work without tragedy. Every love story that has lasted in the Western canon — the great ones, the ones that readers still return to centuries after their writing — has the possibility of loss built into its structure. Sometimes the loss is consummated in death. Sometimes in separation. Sometimes in the slower tragedies of incompatibility, or duty, or the simple passage of time across two lives that cannot finally be lived in the same place. The reason these stories endure is that they tell the truth about what love is. Love is the orientation of one finite being toward another finite being in the knowledge that the other is mortal, fragile, capable of leaving, capable of being lost. Without that knowledge, the thing is not love. It is something else — a contract, a convenience, a transaction in which neither party stands to be undone by the absence of the other. Love is the willingness to be undone. The willingness is the substance.

The same is true of every other good a free creature can pursue. Friendship is the willingness to be betrayed and to remain. Vocation is the willingness to fail at the thing one has staked one’s life on. Citizenship is the willingness to bind oneself to a polity whose decisions one may not be able to control. Parenthood is the willingness to love a being one cannot protect from every harm. In every case, the structure is the same. The good is constituted by the possibility of its loss. Remove the possibility and you do not get a safer version of the good. You get a different thing entirely, which is not worth the name.

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The American republic was founded on this insight, and the founders chose their words with care. The Preamble does not say In Order to form a perfect Union. It says In Order to form a more perfect Union. The comparative is doing the philosophy. More is the word of a creature in time, who can move, who can build, who can fail, who can recover. Perfect is the word of a state that has been removed from time, that admits no motion, that admits no failure, and that therefore admits no recovery either. The founders did not pretend they had achieved perfection. They pretended nothing of the sort. What they offered was the structural promise that the Union they were constituting would be capable of becoming more than it currently was, by the exercise of the freedoms it would protect, under the conditions of contingency it would not pretend to abolish.

This is what makes the American project, when it works, an answer to the older question. More perfect, not perfect. The phrase contains its own warning against utopianism. It contains its own acknowledgment of imperfection. It contains its own commitment to motion. A republic capable of becoming more than it is is a republic in which freedom is real, in which choice has consequences, in which the citizens can fail and recover, in which the institutions are imperfect and can be improved without ever being completed. The completion is not the goal. The completion would be the end of the thing the founders were trying to constitute. The motion is the goal. The capacity for the motion is the freedom. The freedom is the dignity. The dignity is what we are.

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More perfect. Not perfect.

More is constructed of freedom and love. That is what meaning is. That is who we are.

We are not creatures who happen to have these capacities. We are these capacities, in action, in time, under risk. To be human is to be the kind of being for which more-perfect-not-perfect is the available form of motion — not a settling for less than the perfect, but a recognition that the perfect, if it were achieved, would not be a higher form of our existence but the abolition of our existence as the kind of creature we are. The Greeks knew this. The founders knew this. Every poet who has ever written a love story in which the lovers were parted has known this. Every citizen who has ever stood inside an imperfect republic and refused either to leave or to demand its perfection has known this.

The burden we carry to be free is real. The falling is real. The losses are real, and they are ours, and they cannot be talked out of being the losses they are. But the carrying is also real, and the carrying is what we are doing when we choose, and the choosing is what we are doing when we love, and the loving is what we are doing when we live.

That is the deepest truth of the nature of our existence. That is what meaning is. That is who we are.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a book coming out. The book is called Time Change, and Simon & Schuster has put substantial weight behind it, and the New York Times Magazine has run the set-piece excerpt this morning. The piece is framed, with the careful gentleness of the trade, as an inside look at the White House freakout over the Epstein files. The frame is not what the piece is.

What the piece is is a scene. The scene is the John F. Kennedy Conference Room inside the White House Situation Room complex, on the evening of July 17, 2025, at approximately six in the evening. The Vice President of the United States is in the chair. Around the table are the Chief of Staff, the Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, the Communications Director, the Deputy Attorney General, a personal attorney to the President, another personal attorney to the President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs. On speakerphone — on speakerphone, the detail to which I will return — are the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The President is not in the room. The President is not in the building.

The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.

That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.

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I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil, and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to be where it is. I asked, in that piece, why anybody around him is tolerating the insanity. I am writing this piece because today’s excerpt is the beginning of an answer, and the answer is not what some readers wanted to hear. The answer is that some of them are, in fact, no longer tolerating it. They are positioning. They are leaking. They are sitting for interviews. They are, in private rooms, telling Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan things that they know will appear in books published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. They are, in other words, beginning the work of constructing the record by which they will, later, explain what they were doing in the room.

The orbit is not monolithic. The orbit was never monolithic. The orbit was always composed of human beings making individual human choices, and the choices are now beginning to diverge. The piece in this morning’s Magazine is the documentary trace of that divergence, and it is worth reading it as such, with attention, and without pretending it is a story about something else.

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Notice the speakerphone.

The Attorney General of the United States is not in the room. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not in the room. They are on a conference line. This is the senior leadership of the Department of Justice and the senior leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called into a Situation Room meeting about a federal investigation, and they are joining by phone. The Vice President is at the head of the table. The Chief of Staff is in the room. The White House Counsel is in the room. The President’s personal attorneys are in the room. The political and communications staff are in the room. The two figures who actually run the institutions that hold the files are on speakerphone.

There is no version of that arrangement in which the people in the room consider the people on the phone to be peers. There is no version of that arrangement in which the people on the phone are part of the decision. They are being told, by an arrangement that announces itself in its very architecture, that they will hear what the decision is. The architecture of the speakerphone is the architecture of an instruction. The political leadership of the executive branch and the personal legal team of the President are deciding what the senior officers of the Justice Department will be allowed to do about a federal investigation into a man with whom the President has been associated, and the senior officers of the Justice Department are being looped in by phone so they can be told.

That is not, by itself, news. We have known for a year what the Justice Department has become. But the speakerphone is the visible documentary fact of it, captured in a book that will be on the Times bestseller list in two weeks. It is part of the record now. Pam Bondi was on the phone. Kash Patel was on the phone. Susie Wiles, David Warrington, and the rest were in the room.

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Notice who is leaking.

Susie Wiles is the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. If Susie Wiles has told colleagues that the Vice President of the United States has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories, and if that characterization has made it into a book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, then either Susie Wiles wanted it in the book or someone in her direct orbit wanted it in the book or her conversations with colleagues are being leaked by colleagues she trusted and the leakers wanted it in the book. There are no other options. Chiefs of staff do not have private conversations about the Vice President that appear in Magazine excerpts by accident. The characterization is in the book because someone with access to her decided it should be in the book.

That tells you where the loyalty lines are running. The Chief of Staff’s office is, by some mechanism direct or indirect, on the record characterizing the Vice President as a conspiracist. The Vice President is, by some mechanism direct or indirect, on the record advocating for the disclosure of the files the President cannot afford to have disclosed. These two characterizations did not appear in the same book by accident. The book is documenting a fracture, and the fracture is between the West Wing and the Office of the Vice President, and it is on the Epstein file specifically, and it is happening now.

There is a third party to the fracture, and the third party is the Justice Department. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI are on speakerphone. They are not, in the scene as reported, leaking. They are not, in the scene as reported, positioning. But the people in the room are positioning around them, and the people in the room are positioning around the question of whether the institutions they nominally lead will be made to do what those institutions are being asked to do. The Justice Department is the silent party to the meeting. Its silence in the reporting is itself reporting.

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I have written, in these pages, about the political project of the tech and finance orbit that placed the Vice President where he is. I have written, in these pages, about the donor class whose preferences run through both wings of the present administration. I have written, in these pages, about the legal and commentariat class that makes its living laundering the indefensible and that will, in due course, need to launder the post-administration narratives of the men currently in the room. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the orbit is composed of human beings who have made themselves available for this work, and that their choices to be available will, sooner or later, require an accounting.

The accounting has begun. It has not begun in the courts and it has not begun in the Congress and it has not begun in any official venue that has the authority to compel the truth. It has begun in the most American venue possible: in a book deal, in a Magazine excerpt, in the careful curation of which scenes get told by which sources to which reporters under which conditions of attribution. The accounting that has begun is not justice. It is the dress rehearsal for the explanations that the men in the room will, later, offer for what they were doing there.

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The Vice President will say, when the time comes, that he was the one in the room who advocated for disclosure. He will say that he pushed for a congressional inquiry. He will say, through the lips of his friends and the pens of his sympathetic biographers, that he understood the issue was significant, that he was visibly anxious because he was a man of conscience, that he had been aggressively pursuing the matter against the obstruction of the West Wing. He will have, by the time he needs them, on-the-record sources who placed him in the chair at the head of the table on the evening of July 17, 2025, in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room, doing the right thing.

The Chief of Staff will say, when the time comes, that the Vice President was a conspiracist, that the West Wing was trying to manage a difficult situation responsibly, that the aggressive pursuit of the Epstein issue by the Vice President was itself a danger to the orderly conduct of the administration. She will have, by the time she needs them, on-the-record sources of her own.

The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI will say, when the time comes, that they were on speakerphone, that they were not in the room, that the decisions made about the federal investigation were made by people other than them, that they were following the chain of command as they understood it. They will have, in their defense, the documentary fact of the speakerphone.

Each of these explanations is being prepared now. Each of them is being seeded into the record now. Each of them will be deployed, at the appropriate time, by the appropriate person, through the appropriate journalistic intermediary, with the appropriate degree of plausible deniability. This is what an orbit does when it begins to anticipate that it will have to answer.

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I have written, in these pages, about the older categories the present moment is recovering. One of those categories is the one we are watching this morning. Regimes do not, as a rule, collapse from the outside. Regimes fracture from the inside, slowly, in private rooms, through the gradual recognition by the men and women around the central figure that the central figure cannot, finally, be defended, and that the only remaining question is who will be on the record as having tried.

The orbit is fracturing. It is fracturing in a book deal, in a Magazine excerpt, in the choreography of leaks and counter-leaks by which the most senior officials of an administration begin to prepare their separate exits. It is not yet fracturing in the open. It is not yet fracturing in any way that a citizen of this republic could vote on, or sue over, or compel testimony about. It is fracturing where it can be fractured first: in the curated record being built for the day when the central figure is no longer the central figure, and the orbit will have to explain itself.

We should not mistake this for justice. We should not mistake this for opposition. We should not mistake this for the system working. What we are watching is the orbit of an evil man preparing the documentary record by which the men and women in his orbit will, later, claim not to have been part of it. The record they are building is for their benefit, not ours. The accounting they are arranging is to themselves, in advance, in their own preferred terms, through their own preferred journalists.

We are, all of us, allowed to refuse the terms. We are allowed to read the Magazine piece and notice the speakerphone. We are allowed to notice who is leaking and who is leaked about. We are allowed to remember, when the time comes and the Vice President is being praised in some respectable venue for his retrospective conscience, that he sat at the head of the table on the evening of July 17, 2025, while the Attorney General of the United States listened in by phone, and that he did not, in any meaningful sense, do anything to stop what he was, by his own account, anxiously aware was happening.

Notice the speakerphone. Notice who is leaking. Notice the orbit.

Go Deeper into the Circus

For a generation the Democratic Party has been told, by people who are paid to know such things, that the way to win an election in the United States is to concede the moral premise of the opposition on immigration and then quarrel over the implementation. Secure the border first. Enforcement is a precondition. We can talk about a path once the public is reassured. The consultants who said these things were paid handsomely. The polling that supported them was extensive. The strategy was executed with discipline for thirty years.

It did not work. It was never going to work. A politics that begins by conceding the moral premise of the opposition cannot defeat the opposition; it can only manage the speed at which it loses. And while it has been losing, the apparatus it was helping to legitimize has grown into the thing we are now living through. American citizens have been detained by federal agents who could not produce a warrant and would not name the authority under which they acted. Legally present immigrants — green card holders, visa holders, asylees with paperwork in good order — have been removed from the country in defiance of statute and in defiance of judicial orders. Children have been separated from parents who committed no crime. People have died in custody. Cruelty has been administered at a scale unlike anything in this country in living memory, and it has been administered openly, deliberately, as policy.

This is a stain. The older word is the accurate word. The apparatus that has been built and the apparatus that is being built every day are the documentary practices of a regime, and they are being conducted in the name of every American citizen, including the ones who voted against it and the ones who did not vote at all. We are all implicated in what is done in our name until we say, out loud and in public, that it must stop.

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It must stop. All deportations should be halted pending a full investigation of the apparatus and its conduct. Every person currently in detention should have their case reviewed by a court that is independent of the executive that detained them. Every removal that has occurred under this administration should be examined for compliance with law. And the persons who have been deported in violation of statute should be returned, at the expense of the government that wronged them, to the lives the government took from them.

That is the floor. That is what a serious country does when it discovers that its own enforcement apparatus has been operating outside the law. It is not radical. It is not utopian. It is the minimum a republic owes to the persons within its jurisdiction when the republic’s agents have violated the trust placed in them.

The ceiling is higher and it is also older than us. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. He granted amnesty to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. He did so because he understood, as a conservative, that a country cannot maintain a permanent shadow class of persons who live and work and pay taxes and raise children within its borders without legal standing. He did so because the cruelty of maintaining such a class was inconsistent with the country he believed himself to lead. He did so because it was the right thing to do, and because doing the right thing was, in his framing, also the conservative thing to do.

The policy I am calling for is to the right of Ronald Reagan on his own terms. The Democratic Party should run, openly and without apology, on an amnesty for all persons currently in the United States who have committed no serious crime. Not a path. Not a process. An amnesty. The word Reagan used, the policy Reagan signed, the moral framing Reagan accepted. If the consultants tell you this is politically impossible, ask them how the politically possible has been working out.

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I am asking the Democratic Party to do something the consultants have spent thirty years explaining cannot be done. I am asking it to draw a line in the sand. I am asking it to say, in language that a citizen can understand, that there are things this country does not do, and that the deportation of legally present immigrants and the detention of citizens and the administration of cruelty as policy are among those things, and that a party which cannot say so out loud has nothing left worth running on.

The line in the sand is not a slogan. It is a structural commitment. It is the difference between a politics organized around what is testable in a focus group and a politics organized around what is true. The first kind of politics has produced the present situation. It has produced a Democratic Party that, in the face of an evil apparatus, has spent its energy explaining why it cannot afford to say the apparatus is evil. The second kind of politics — morality-driven politics, in the older sense — is the only thing that can defeat what is in front of us, because it is the only thing that names what is in front of us.

I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to participate. The Democratic strategists and consultants who have spent a generation telling their party that the way to defeat this man is to concede his moral premise on immigration are part of that orbit too, in their own way. They are not in his Cabinet. They are not signing his orders. But they have, by their craft and their advice and their professional confidence, helped to construct the political world in which the apparatus could be built and could grow and could conduct itself as it has. That is a participation also, and it requires its own accounting.

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I have written, in these pages, about the constitutional commitments this country once made to persons within its jurisdiction. I have written, in these pages, about the moral language a country once meant when it spoke of welcoming the stranger. I have written, in these pages, about the kind of politics worth running on, and the kind of candidates a serious opposition would produce. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the recovery of this country requires the recovery of the older moral vocabulary, and that the recovery of the older moral vocabulary requires the political courage to use it in public, on a platform, under one’s own name, in front of voters who have been told for a generation that such language is too dangerous to deploy.

It is not too dangerous. It is the only thing that is not too dangerous. Everything else has been tried.

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We should be a welcoming country again. The sentence is simple and it is the sentence on which the platform stands. A halt to deportations pending investigation. An amnesty for all persons within the country who have committed no serious crime. A return of those wrongfully removed. A restoration of due process to the detention of any person, citizen or otherwise, in the territory of the United States. A public accounting of the apparatus that has done what has been done. A commitment that no future administration of either party will be permitted to operate such an apparatus again.

These are not gifts to immigrants. These are obligations of a republic to the persons within its jurisdiction, and they are also obligations of a republic to itself. A country that does what this country is doing is not the country it claims to be. The gap between what we are and what we claim to be is the stain. The work of closing the gap is the line in the sand.

I am asking the Democratic Party to draw it. I am asking every candidate for federal office in the next two cycles to be asked, on the record, whether they will draw it. I am asking every Democratic strategist who is paid to advise such candidates to be asked, on the record, whether they have advised against drawing it. I am asking every voter who reads these pages to refuse to vote for a candidate who will not say the line out loud.

The consultants will say this is impossible. The consultants have been wrong for thirty years. Draw the line.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The word is old and it is precise. It has fallen out of fashion in the commentariat because the commentariat is in the business of euphemism, and euphemism is the dialect of people who have something to lose. Authoritarian. Illiberal. Norm-breaking. Anti-democratic. Each of these words is a step backward from the thing itself. Each of them buys the speaker a little more distance from the cost of saying what is in front of all of us. I am done with that distance. The man is evil. He is not complicated. He is not misunderstood. He is not a vessel for forces larger than himself, though forces larger than himself have certainly found their vessel. He is a man, and the man is evil, and the evidence is the daily record of his life.

He wants his face in our passports. He wants his name on our institutions. He wants his image on the money. These are not stray ambitions. These are not the eccentric flourishes of a man who has been in power too long. These are the documentary practices of tyranny, and they are older than the republic he was sworn to defend. Caesar put his face on the coins. Mao put his face on the currency. Kim puts his face on every wall. The American president now wants his face on the passport of every citizen who leaves the country in his name. That sentence ought to be enough. In a serious country it would be enough.

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Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

The question is not rhetorical. I want it asked out loud, by name, in the rooms where it matters, by the people who go home at night and tell themselves they are the adults in the room. I want it asked of the Cabinet members who have signed on to be the cabinet of a man whose pathology is not a secret and has never been a secret. I want it asked of the aides who walk down the hallway with their phones in their hands and pretend they did not hear what they just heard. I want it asked of the Senate Republicans who have voted, vote after vote, to let this man put his name and his face and his will on the institutions of the United States. I want it asked of the donors who have written the checks. I want it asked of the lawyers who have drafted the briefs. I want it asked of the press secretaries who have stood at the podium and said the words they were told to say. I want it asked of every single one of them, and I want them to have to answer it, and I want the answer to be on the record.

There is no good answer. There is only the answer of careerism, and the answer of cowardice, and the answer of the ambient corruption of being in the orbit of a man whose pathology you have to pretend not to see. The aides who tell their friends he is not really like that. The Cabinet members who tell themselves they are the bulwark. The Senate Republicans who tell themselves they are the moderating influence. The donors who tell themselves they are funding tax policy. The legal team that tells itself it is doing the work of the law. Each of these is a lie. Each of these is a lie that the person telling it knows is a lie. And each of these lies is the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute infrastructure by which an evil man is permitted to put his face on the passports of a free people.

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I have written, in these pages, about the donor class that funds him. I have written about the executives who have decided that the cost of resistance is higher than the cost of accommodation. I have written about the legal and commentariat class that has made a profession of laundering the indefensible. I have written about the tech and finance orbit that has been preparing for this for thirty years. I have written about the older categories that the present moment is recovering. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the man at the center is not alone. He has never been alone. He is at the center of a structure, and the structure is composed of human beings, and every one of those human beings has made the choice, every day, to be where they are.

The man is the symptom and also the cause. The structure is the symptom and also the cause. Both things can be true. Both things are true. But the moral fact at the center of the structure is the man, and the man is evil, and to refuse to say so is to participate in the laundering operation by which a free country is taught to accept the unacceptable one euphemism at a time.

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I know how this language reads. I know the reflex it produces in the well-trained reader of American political prose. Evil is the word the serious are supposed to avoid. The serious are supposed to speak of incentive structures, of institutional design, of the distorting effects of media ecology, of the rational choices made by rational actors under conditions of polarization. The serious are supposed to speak in the passive voice. The serious are supposed to use the word concerning when they mean evil and the word unprecedented when they mean evil and the word destabilizing when they mean evil. I have been reading this prose for a decade. It has not worked. It was not designed to work. It was designed to allow the people who write it to keep their jobs in a profession whose business model depends on not naming the thing that is in front of all of us.

I am not in that profession. I do not have that business model. I have these pages, and I have my own name on them, and I have the older words.

The man is evil. The structure around him is composed of people who know he is evil and have decided, every day, to be there anyway. The country is being run by a coalition of one pathological human being and several thousand careerists who have agreed not to use the word that describes him. The passports are next. The money is next. The institutions are next. These are not predictions. These are the announced intentions of the man in question.

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Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

I want every reader of these pages to ask that question of every person they know who is, in any way, in that orbit. The brother-in-law who works for a contractor. The college friend who took the job at the agency. The neighbor who writes the op-eds. The cousin who answers the phones in the Senate office. The acquaintance who signs the checks. Ask them. Make them answer. Do not let them off with it is complicated or you do not understand the inside or the alternative would be worse. There is no alternative that would be worse than putting the face of an evil man on the passport of a free people. There is no inside knowledge that justifies it. There is no complication that absolves it. The question is simple, and it deserves a simple answer, and the absence of a simple answer is itself the answer.

The man is evil. The people around him know it. They have made the choice to be around him anyway. That choice is the substance of the present American crisis. It is not a crisis of institutions, though the institutions are being destroyed. It is not a crisis of norms, though the norms are being violated. It is a crisis of individual human beings making individual human choices to participate in something they know to be wrong. Every one of those choices is recoverable. Every one of those people could, tomorrow morning, walk out of the building and say what they know to be true. Every one of them is choosing not to. That choice is the thing.

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I write this knowing it will be called intemperate. I write this knowing it will be called unserious. I write this knowing that the people who have spent a decade training themselves not to use the older words will say that the older words are not useful. I do not care. The older words are accurate. The accuracy is the use. There is no version of the present moment in which the failure to name the man results in the man being less of what he is. There is only the version in which the failure to name him results in the rest of us forgetting how to say it.

Donald Trump is evil. He wants his face on the passports of a free people. He wants his name on the institutions of a republic that is older than him and was meant to outlast him. He wants the documentary practices of tyranny, and he is being given them, one signature at a time, by people who know exactly what they are doing.

Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

Ask them.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Trump is alive. The piece I posted on Tuesday, in which I asserted that the 47th President of the United States had died and that his death was being covered up, was wrong. I was misled by sources I had reason to trust. The error was mine to credit them past what my own standards should have allowed. I am writing this to say so plainly, without qualification, without hedge, and without an attempt to salvage the larger argument by burying the retraction inside it.

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I am not a journalist. Notes from the Circus is not a publication that breaks news. The work I am trained for, and the work this publication exists to do, is analysis and philosophy and the reading of the country. That is a different craft from journalism. It uses different sources, different verification habits, different professional reflexes. When I posted what I posted on Tuesday, I was attempting journalism — a factual assertion about a real-world event, sourced privately, published under my own authority — without the infrastructure that journalism requires to do that work responsibly. Journalism has the standards it has because journalism has been burned, repeatedly, by exactly what burned me. I did not have those standards in place because they are not the standards of my publication, and on Tuesday I crossed from one craft into the other without acknowledging that I had crossed, and I got the result that the absent infrastructure exists to prevent.

That is the honest description of what happened. I do not offer it to soften the error. I offer it because the wrong description — I was deceived — is only half the picture, and the half it omits is the half I am responsible for. The deception is real. The crediting of the deception, in a piece published past the floor of my own publication’s standards, is mine. Those are two failures and the second one is the one I own.

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The readers who pushed back at the time were right.

When the piece went up, a number of readers responded immediately and said, in different registers, that I had offered no evidence and was asking them to trust me past what the publication had ever asked them to trust me before. They were applying the floor that this publication had trained them to apply, the floor I had built across every prior piece in the archive by documenting every load-bearing claim. They were doing what serious readers are supposed to do. I replied to several of them, in real time, in a register I would now take back if I could — suggesting that my awareness of the reputational risk should itself function as evidence of my certainty. That reply was wrong on its own terms. I would not say this if I were not sure is not evidence, and I had spent the week before writing pieces that dismantled exactly that move when other writers made it. I told my readers, in effect, that the standard did not apply to me on this particular occasion because of the strength of my private certainty. That was the move of a writer who had stopped being trustworthy in real time, and I did not see it then, and I see it now.

Those readers were right. I was wrong with them. I am hearing them now.

Others said the same thing in different language. Some wrote privately. Some asked, more gently, whether I had been hacked. Some asked whether I was okay. The shape of all of those responses was the same shape, and the shape was correct: the writer we trust has departed from the standard we trust him by, and we are reaching for the most charitable explanation we can construct. The most charitable explanation was that something was wrong with me. The accurate explanation was that something was wrong with the piece. I am grateful, in a way I did not have access to on Tuesday, that the readership reached first for the charitable reading. That is the kind of readership a publication should be lucky to have, and I will try to deserve it going forward.

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The work this publication does is the work I am returning to. Analysis. Philosophy. The reading of the country. The kind of writing where the load-bearing claims are documented in the piece itself, where the reader can inspect the floor under any conclusion I draw, where the authority comes from argument and citation rather than from the writer’s private certainty. That is the floor of Notes from the Circus and it is the floor I departed from on Tuesday and it is the floor I am restating now.

I will not again publish a factual assertion about a real-world event on the basis of sourcing I cannot disclose. That is the specific commitment, narrowly stated, that I can honor. It does not promise I will not be wrong about other things — analysis can be wrong, philosophy can be wrong, readings of the country can be wrong, and when those are wrong they will be wrong in ways I can defend the methodology of even as I revise the conclusion. The Tuesday piece was wrong in a different way. It was wrong in a way I could not defend the methodology of even when I believed the conclusion, because the methodology was journalism performed without journalism’s tools. That kind of wrong, I will not repeat.

The pieces from the run of the last week — the prepared release — stand. They are analysis. Their load-bearing claims are documented inside them. Economic Royalists cites FDR’s 1936 acceptance speech and the standing-doctrine genealogy from Frothingham through Lujan. Who Does Sarah Isgur Work For documents the resumes it diagnoses. The Sovereign Individual Was The Blueprint quotes the book at length. A Fascism Older Than Fascism makes its case from the historical record. Those pieces are the work. They are the floor I am returning to, because they are the floor I should not have left.

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To the readers who pushed back at the time: thank you. You were doing the work this publication asked you to do, and I needed to hear what you said when you said it, and I did not, and I have heard it now.

To the readers who stayed: thank you. I will try to be worth it.

I was wrong. The next piece will be analysis. The publication continues.

Go Deeper into the Circus

More on this soon.

UPDATE: My sources weren’t lying. They honestly thought he was dead. He had been hidden away apparently due to serious health problems.

The question has a literal answer and a structural answer, and the literal answer does not satisfy the question.

The literal answer is The Dispatch. Sarah Isgur is a senior editor of the conservative-leaning digital media company founded in 2019 by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg and Toby Stock, where she hosts the legal podcast Advisory Opinions with David French and edits SCOTUSblog since The Dispatch acquired it in late 2024. French formally works for The Dispatch as well, and additionally for The New York Times, where he has been an opinion columnist since January 2023. The two of them produce, twice a week, a podcast of considerable professional polish, in which they discuss the federal courts and the cases before them with appropriate respect for the institutions, careful attention to doctrinal complexity, and the kind of measured tone the audience associates with seriousness.

This answer is true and it does not satisfy the question. It does not satisfy because the question, as it is being asked here, is not asking who signs the checks. The question is asking what the pattern of the work is for, what intellectual and political ecosystem the work is embedded inside, what the work is doing in the world even when the work appears to be merely the careful explication of legal doctrine.

The pattern, when you look at it carefully, is unmistakable. And the pattern’s name is the answer to the question.

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Begin with the resumes, because the resumes are the documentary record of the institutional ecosystem these two professionals have spent their entire careers inside.

Isgur went to Harvard Law School. While there, she was president of the Harvard Federalist Society chapter, which is among the most consequential things a law student can be inside the conservative legal movement, because the Federalist Society chapter presidency is one of the standard credentials for the network’s identification of its rising professionals. After law school, she clerked for Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit, who is one of the most conservative federal appellate judges of the past forty years and a key node in the Federalist Society judicial-selection network. She then worked at Cooper & Kirk, the firm of Charles Cooper, who is a major Federalist Society figure and one of the principal litigators of the conservative legal movement. She also worked at Wiley Rein, another elite conservative-movement litigation shop. From there she moved to the National Republican Senatorial Committee as legal counsel. Then to Ted Cruz’s 2010 Texas attorney-general campaign as political director. Then to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Then to the Republican National Committee as deputy communications director from 2013 to 2015. Then to Carly Fiorina’s super PAC and then her presidential campaign, where she was deputy campaign manager. Then, in December 2016, to the Trump transition, where she joined Jeff Sessions’s confirmation team and ran his mock confirmation hearings. Then to the Department of Justice as spokesperson for the Office of Public Affairs and senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during the Mueller Investigation. Then, after Sessions was fired and Isgur with him, briefly to CNN (a hire that produced internal revolt and was rescinded), then to ABC News as a contributor, then to The Dispatch in November 2019.

This is not the resume of a neutral legal analyst. This is the resume of a Republican political operative with deep credentials inside the conservative legal movement who pivoted to media after the political infrastructure she was working inside became uncongenial to her with the Trumpist takeover of the Republican party.

French’s path runs through a different but adjacent corner of the same ecosystem. Harvard Law. Senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, which is Jay Sekulow’s organization, one of the principal Christian-right litigation shops of the past forty years. Senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most active conservative-Christian litigation organizations in the country, which has argued and won numerous Supreme Court cases narrowing the application of antidiscrimination law and expanding religious-liberty doctrine. President of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now Expression. JAG officer in the Iraq War, Bronze Star. National Review senior writer, 2015 to 2019. Co-founder and senior editor of The Dispatch, 2019. New York Times opinion columnist, January 2023 to present.

These are not neutral career paths. These are the career paths of two professionals who have spent their entire working lives inside one specific institutional ecosystem — the Federalist Society and the conservative-Christian legal movement and the Republican political infrastructure and the conservative-media apparatus that the Powell Memo project began funding in 1971 and that has now been operating for fifty-five years.

What distinguishes Isgur and French from most of their peers in this ecosystem is that they broke with the Trumpist insurgency in 2016 and have remained, sincerely and at some professional cost, Never Trump conservatives. This is real. This is worth giving them credit for. They have written and said things, repeatedly and on the record, that have made them unwelcome in significant portions of the institutional space they used to inhabit. French in particular has paid real costs — sustained personal attacks, threats to his family, the loss of friends and professional relationships — for his refusal to align with the populist-Trumpist takeover of the conservative movement.

But the Never Trump conservative position has a structural feature that is the subject of this piece. The position requires its practitioners to maintain a particular distinction. The distinction is between the good parts of the conservative legal movement and the bad parts of the contemporary right. The good parts are the Federalist Society judicial pipeline, the originalist jurisprudence, the careful doctrinal work of the conservative legal academy, the institutional rigor of the conservative think tanks, the constitutional seriousness of figures like the late Antonin Scalia and the late William Rehnquist and the still-living Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The bad parts are the populist-Trumpist insurgency, the Christian-nationalist movement, the conspiratorial right of the Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin variety, the petro-AI rentier coalition that has captured the executive branch.

The position requires that these two clusters be treated as separable. The position falls apart if they are understood as products of the same forty-year project.

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This is where the obscurantism enters, and it enters through a specific legal doctrine.

On June 2, 2026, the Advisory Opinions episode that gave occasion to this piece was published under the title President Trump’s Losing Streak. The episode discusses the Kennedy Center ruling, the Trump v. IRS motion, and the injunction on the weaponization fund. The framing — implicit but consistent — is that the legal system is functioning. Trump is acting unlawfully. The courts are constraining him. The constitutional order is holding. The professionals discussing the cases are reassuring their audience, in the register of doctrinal sobriety, that the institutions are doing their work.

This framing is true at the level of the cases discussed. The framing is false at the level of the cases not discussed. And the cases not discussed are precisely the ones where the structural question becomes inescapable.

Trump fires inspectors general en masse, in evident violation of statutes governing their removal, gutting the oversight architecture that Congress built into the executive branch precisely to prevent the kind of self-dealing the current administration is now engaged in. No federal court has constrained these firings, and the reason is that under current standing doctrine, no plaintiff has been able to establish the concrete particularized injury the doctrine requires.

Trump installs DOGE personnel inside the Treasury payment system, the IRS database, the Social Security records, the security clearances database, in violation of the Privacy Act and a stack of other statutes. Some plaintiffs have managed to establish standing in some of these cases, after extended litigation. In many of the cases, plaintiffs have been dismissed on standing grounds. Where plaintiffs have survived, the merits proceed slowly while the data continues to be accessed.

Trump bombed Iran in February of this year without congressional authorization, killing four hundred American service members and dragging the country into a Middle Eastern war that Congress had not voted on. Members of Congress have repeatedly attempted to assert standing in war-powers cases for fifty years and have repeatedly been rejected. Citizens whose tax dollars fund the bombing and whose sons and daughters were placed at risk have, under current doctrine, no concrete particularized injury. No federal court has reached the merits.

Trump appointed, on the morning of June 2, by a Truth Social post, the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to be Acting Director of National Intelligence, in evident violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and possibly the Appointments Clause itself. Standing? The intelligence community has been injured but cannot sue itself. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have institutional interests but the Roberts Court has narrowed congressional standing nearly to nullity in Raines v. Byrd and its successors. Citizens whose security depends on a functioning intelligence community have no concrete particularized injury under the doctrine. The action stands.

What standing doctrine does, in its current form, is to insulate the largest and most consequential executive actions — the ones that affect everyone in general but no one specifically enough to satisfy the doctrine’s criteria — from judicial review. The smaller, more specific actions can be challenged. The structural, system-altering actions cannot. This is precisely the inversion of what a constitutional check would, by design, want to do.

And this doctrine — this is the part that the Never Trump conservative position cannot say plainly without dismantling itself — was constructed by the conservative legal movement, deliberately, over the past five decades, for exactly this purpose.

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The historical doctrine, the one that prevailed from the founding through roughly the mid-twentieth century, was significantly more permissive. Citizen suits, taxpayer suits, qui tam actions, generalized grievance suits, suits by state attorneys general on behalf of their populations, suits by members of Congress to enforce constitutional limits on the executive — all of these were routinely entertained by federal courts. The system worked because the courts could reach structural constitutional violations even when no single plaintiff had been distinctively harmed. Marbury v. Madison itself would not survive the standing analysis the Roberts Court now applies; William Marbury’s injury was the denial of a commission for an office that paid no salary and conferred no power he did not already have, and the modern doctrine would dismiss the case for failure to establish redressable concrete harm.

The narrowing began with Frothingham v. Mellon in 1923 and proceeded slowly through the mid-twentieth century. The decisive construction of the modern restrictive doctrine happened under Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and Scalia from the 1970s through the 1990s. Scalia’s 1983 article The Doctrine of Standing as an Essential Element of the Separation of Powers, in the Suffolk University Law Review, is the foundational text. Scalia argued, with characteristic clarity about the project, that standing doctrine should function as a constitutional firewall protecting executive-branch action from judicial review by anyone other than directly injured private parties. The article was not written as constitutional analysis. It was written as a brief for a particular doctrinal outcome the conservative legal movement wanted, and the article became the doctrine because Scalia ascended to the Supreme Court three years later and spent the next thirty years making it so. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife in 1992 was Scalia’s own opinion implementing the framework he had argued for. Allen v. Wright, Schlesinger v. Reservists Committee, Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United, Spokeo v. Robins, Clapper v. Amnesty International, TransUnion v. Ramirez — the line of cases is continuous, the direction of doctrinal motion is one-way, and the political effect is to insulate executive action from judicial review when the action benefits the people the conservative legal movement was built to serve and harms the people the movement was less interested in.

This is the part that the Advisory Opinions register cannot reach. The doctrine is presented in their discussions as a feature of the legal landscape — the law is what it is, the courts cannot act, no one has standing. The political genealogy of the doctrine is left undiscussed. The fact that the doctrine was constructed by a specific movement for a specific purpose is left undiscussed. The asymmetric application of the doctrine is left undiscussed. Citizens United found standing for a corporation to challenge campaign finance law on First Amendment grounds. Bruen found standing to challenge gun regulations. Dobbs found standing to challenge state abortion regulations. Kennedy v. Bremerton found standing for a coach who had been put on paid administrative leave to challenge his school district. AFP v. Bonta found standing for donor-disclosure challenges. The doctrine’s restrictiveness is asymmetric. The asymmetry is the project. And the asymmetry cannot be named without naming the project, and the project cannot be named without confronting the structural fact that the project produced both the captured judiciary and, through related but distinguishable mechanisms, the political conditions under which Trump now operates.

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There is a name for the move Isgur and French are making, and the name comes from a piece of mid-twentieth-century legal-realist scholarship that the conservative legal movement has done its best to bury.

The name is legal formalism as political ideology. The legal realists — Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, Felix Cohen, the early Holmes — pointed out a hundred years ago that any time a contestable legal doctrine is presented as if it were a fixed feature of the legal terrain rather than a constructed artifact reflecting specific political choices, the presentation itself is doing political work. The work is to take a contestable choice and dress it as a non-negotiable necessity. The work is to convert we have decided this into this has been decided.

Standing doctrine in its current form is paradigmatic. Its present shape is a choice. The choice was made, deliberately, by a specific political-legal movement, for specific political purposes. The choice can be unmade, by political-legal action of the same kind that made it. To present the current doctrine as the inevitable shape of Article III is to misrepresent the doctrine’s history, its construction, and its alternatives. The misrepresentation serves the movement that made the choice. The misrepresentation, when it is performed by figures who are themselves products of the movement that made the choice, is the ideology operating as if it were the law.

When Isgur and French perform standing doctrine in the register of the law just is what it is and the courts cannot act, they are performing legal formalism as political ideology in the textbook sense. The performance is conducted with high professional polish. The performance is sincere. They are not, I believe, knowingly deceiving anyone. They have internalized the doctrine to the point where they no longer experience it as a contestable construction. They experience it as the air they breathe. This is what successful ideological work produces — a generation of practitioners who can no longer perceive the contingent constructions they are operating inside, and who present those constructions to their audiences as the unavoidable shape of reality.

The audience for this performance is the Never Trump conservative who needs to believe that the legal system is functioning within its appropriate constraints, that the constraints are necessary and proper, that the system is doing what can reasonably be expected of it, and that the failure of the system to constrain Trump in the structural cases is regrettable but inevitable rather than the consequence of a forty-year political project the audience and the hosts are both participants in. This audience is paying The Dispatch’s subscription fees in part precisely to be told this. The product is the reassurance that the system is working. The reassurance requires the obscurantism. The obscurantism is what produces the Advisory Opinions register, in episode after episode, year after year.

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So return to the question.

Who does Sarah Isgur work for?

The literal answer is The Dispatch. The structural answer is the conservative legal movement that produced her career, that built the doctrine she now uses to explain why the courts cannot act, and that is, through related but distinguishable channels, also responsible for the political conditions her podcast describes Trump as losing court cases against. The deeper answer is the audience that pays the subscriptions to be told that the system is working.

None of these answers describe corruption in any vulgar sense. Isgur is not, to anyone’s public knowledge, taking money from Federalist Society donors directly. She is conducting herself with what she would call professional integrity inside the institutional space she has spent her career inside. The obscurantism is structural, not corrupt. It is what her professional position requires her to perform if she wants to keep doing what she is doing in the venues she is doing it in.

But the structural is not less consequential than the corrupt. The structural is, in some respects, more consequential, because the structural produces consistent ideological work without anyone having to be bribed to do it. The conservative legal movement has, in Isgur and French, two of its most articulate and most sincere practitioners — professionals who have internalized the movement’s commitments so thoroughly that they can perform the movement’s ideological work in the register of doctrinal neutrality, persuading their audience that the doctrine is the doctrine and the law is the law and there is nothing more to be said. The audience is reassured. The structural question goes unasked. The forty-year project continues.

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This is, as I have written elsewhere this week, the operational pattern that runs across the captured institutions. It is the same pattern I named in Business Ought Never Be Politics when I described the captured regulatory agencies and the captured legal academy and the captured judicial pipeline. It is the same pattern I named in Economic Royalists when I described the apparatus that built the wall around the corporate-personhood doctrine and the standing doctrine and the Citizens United doctrine and the Lochner doctrine and the entire architecture of legal sanction within which the current oligarchy operates. The legal-doctrinal apparatus and the political-economic apparatus are two faces of the same project. The project required the legal apparatus to construct the doctrines that would prevent the political apparatus from being constrained, and the legal apparatus did so, methodically, over forty years, by exactly the kind of professional work Sarah Isgur and David French were trained to do and have spent their careers doing.

That this is also the apparatus that has now produced political conditions Isgur and French personally find appalling is a real complication for them. They are honest enough to say so, repeatedly and in public. But the complication does not, by their own choice, reach the structural question. The structural question would require them to recognize that the apparatus that produced Trump is the same apparatus that produced the Federalist Society judicial pipeline, the standing doctrine, the corporate-personhood doctrine, the campaign-finance jurisprudence, the regulatory-capture pattern, and the broader collapse of the wall that distinguished political authority from concentrated capital. They cannot name this without dismantling the position they have built their careers inside. They have chosen, instead, to maintain the position and bracket the question.

This is not a moral failure in any individual sense. It is a structural failure of a position. The position, as it currently exists, is incapable of doing the analysis the moment requires. The Sarah Isgurs and David Frenches of the world are the most articulate practitioners of the position. They are also, by virtue of the position’s structural limits, the people who cannot do the work that needs doing.

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The cleanest way to put what this piece is for is that the question who do you work for is a question that almost everyone in the credentialed knowledge class, in the captured institutions, in the legal academy, in the major-paper opinion sections, in the cable-news bench, in the think-tank network, in the foundation-funded NGO sector, has not been asked recently and probably should be. The literal answer almost never satisfies the question. The structural answer is almost always the apparatus that produced the position the person is now occupying. And the apparatus, in most cases, has structural commitments that prevent the position from confronting the actual structural conditions of the moment.

The work of the moment is to do the analysis the structural question requires, in venues that have not yet been captured by the requirement to bracket it. This is part of what these pages have been for. This is part of what the middle road I have been describing is, in its credentialed-knowledge-class application. The middle road for journalists and lawyers and scholars and analysts is the road that asks the question their institutional positions are constructed to prevent them from asking, and asks it out loud, and follows where the answer leads.

Sarah Isgur is not the villain of this piece. Sarah Isgur is the diagnostic case. The diagnostic case is what the position requires of its most articulate practitioners. The diagnostic case is, with appropriate substitution of names and credentials, also the case for most of the rest of us who occupy positions inside captured institutions and have not yet asked the question.

The question is the question. Who do you work for? The answer, when it is honest, is rarely the institution that signs the check. The answer is the apparatus the institution is embedded inside, the doctrines the apparatus has built, the audiences the apparatus has cultivated, and the structural commitments the position requires its occupants to maintain in order to remain in the position.

Asking the question of yourself is the first move. Asking it out loud, in public, in the venues you are paid to inhabit, is the second. Acting on the answer, when the answer is uncomfortable, is the third. The third is where the work begins.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The libertarian right has three rhetorical moves it uses to keep the American trust-doctrine off the table, and each of the three has been working for forty years.

The first move is the Marxism charge. Anyone who proposes that a corporation is a creature of public law, established by a public charter, accountable to public conditions, and revocable for public cause, is told that they are smuggling Marxism into the American political conversation. The charge is a fraud, but the charge has worked. The charge has worked because the population the charge is aimed at has not been told the actual American history of the corporation, and because the apparatus that benefits from the population’s ignorance has spent forty years and many billions of dollars ensuring that the population stays ignorant.

The second move is the slippery-slope warning. Any restoration of the older doctrine is presented as the first step toward Soviet Russia, the gulag, Venezuela, the bread lines. The argument requires the listener to believe that the only stable points on the political-economic axis are the Delaware general-incorporation regime of 1899 and the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin, with no intermediate possibilities. The argument is absurd on its face but it has been deployed so many times by so many surrogates in so many venues that it has acquired the texture of common sense. The intermediate possibilities — the entire history of the American republic from 1787 to 1875, the entire history of the Progressive Era, the entire history of the New Deal — have been deleted from the public memory the slippery-slope warning is operating on.

The third move is the most important, the least examined, and the one that does the actual work of recruiting the people who staff the project. The third move is Atlas Shrugged.

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The libertarian right will put a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in your hand at the moment of your professional formation. They will give it to you as a graduation present, as a hedge-fund onboarding gift, as a startup-orientation reading assignment, as the most influential book of my life on the listicle the firm publishes for its new analysts. The book has been distributed by the apparatus for sixty-five years, in editions running into the tens of millions, and the people who staff the contemporary American oligarchy have, in case after case after case, named it as the formative text of their political imagination. Peter Thiel cites it. Travis Kalanick cited it. Mark Cuban cites it. The Koch family funded the Atlas Society for decades. Paul Ryan made his entire congressional staff read it. The Ayn Rand Institute has been an operating intellectual node of the libertarian apparatus since 1985. The novel is the catechism. The novel is what the people building the kingdoms read in order to understand what they are building and why they are right to build it.

What the novel actually says, stripped of its eleven hundred pages of melodramatic scaffolding, is this. The world is divided into two kinds of human beings. The first kind is the producer — the engineer, the industrialist, the inventor, the financier, the railroad magnate, the steel manufacturer, the philosopher who provides the producers with their moral framework. The producer is the engine of civilization. The producer creates wealth that did not exist before. The producer is rare, valuable, and irreplaceable. The producer is, in the moral framework the novel is constructing, the only kind of human being whose existence is morally legitimate.

The second kind is the moocher and the looter. The moocher is the dependent — the worker who could not have invented the railroad, the customer who could not have built the steel mill, the citizen who could not have philosophized the moral framework. The looter is the politician who taxes the producer, the regulator who constrains the producer, the welfare recipient who lives off the producer’s surplus, the union organizer who demands a share of what the producer made. The moocher and the looter are presented as parasites. They contribute nothing. They consume what the producers have made. They are sustained by the producers’ indulgence and they repay the indulgence with envy and resentment and ever-escalating demands.

The story of the novel is the story of the producers, finally, refusing to play the game any longer. They withdraw their productive capacity from the society that has failed to honor them. They go on strike. They retreat to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains called Galt’s Gulch — a jurisdiction outside the political community, governed by a contract among the producers, where wealth is honored and looters are excluded. The society they have withdrawn from collapses without them, as it must, because without the producers there is no production. The book ends with the producers triumphant in their valley, the lesser world in ruins, and the philosophical framework that justifies their withdrawal proven correct by the catastrophe that followed when they were not given what they were owed.

This is the operational manual for what Musk and Thiel and the Bitcoin maximalists are actually doing.

Galt’s Gulch is Starbase, the Texas city Elon Musk has bought and is incorporating as a municipality under his control. Galt’s Gulch is the Network State, the project Balaji Srinivasan has been building under Peter Thiel’s funding, in which the wealthy construct their own jurisdictions on top of or alongside the existing ones. Galt’s Gulch is Próspera, the special economic zone in Honduras where the law has been written by the corporation that operates the zone. Galt’s Gulch is the seasteading projects, the charter cities, the libertarian micro-nations that have been proposed and prototyped and funded across the past two decades. Galt’s Gulch, finally, is Mars — the planet Musk has been telling us for fifteen years he intends to colonize, governed not by the United States or by any other terrestrial sovereign but by SpaceX, with the residents subject to the corporate constitution rather than to the laws of any nation on Earth. The novel published in 1957 is the script. The strike is happening. The producers are withdrawing. They are constructing their own jurisdictions. The construction is not metaphorical. The construction is the project I named as the operational execution of the Sovereign Individual doctrine, and the doctrine is what the people building these jurisdictions believe.

The function of the Rand catechism, in the lives of the people who hold it, is to convert what would otherwise be the moral problem of being an extractive elite into the moral satisfaction of being an unjustly subjugated natural ruler. The hedge-fund manager who has structured his fund to pay no tax under the carried-interest treatment is not, in his own self-understanding, a person who has captured a private benefit at public expense. He is John Galt, denied his rightful reward by a society too benighted to recognize what he has built. The platform owner who has used his platform to suppress speech that threatens his political project is not a censor. He is Hank Rearden, defending the metal he invented against the bureaucrats who would seize it. The space entrepreneur who is building a private city outside the jurisdiction of the United States is not a secessionist. He is Ragnar Danneskjöld, the pirate captain in the novel who reclaims by force the wealth that the looters had taken from the producers. The crypto lord who is moving his fortune into Bitcoin to escape the tax authority is not a tax evader. He is Francisco d’Anconia, blowing up his own copper mines rather than letting the looters nationalize them.

This self-image is unanswerable from inside the framework. If the producers are natural rulers, then any constraint on them is illegitimate. If the rest of us are moochers and looters, then our complaints are envy and our demands are theft. If the strike is morally justified, then the catastrophe that follows the strike is our fault for having driven the producers to it. The novel constructs a closed circle of self-justification, and the people who have spent their formative years inside the circle cannot, by any argument internal to the circle, be reached. They have to be reached from outside. They have to be reached from a vocabulary the circle was constructed to exclude.

That vocabulary is the American constitutional tradition. The reaching has been done before. The man who did it most clearly was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the summer of 1936, at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, when he gave the speech that named the project for what it is.

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FDR did not call them socialists. FDR did not call them communists. FDR called them economic royalists, and the choice of word was deliberate and devastating. The Revolution had been fought against royalism. The colonists’ grievance was not against capitalism, which did not yet exist as a coherent system, but against a hereditary and chartered class that had captured political authority and was using it to extract from the productive population. The 1776 fight was a fight against royalism. The 1936 fight, FDR said, was the same fight in modern dress. He read the passage that should still be read in every high-school civics class and is read in essentially none of them.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small businessman, the investments set aside for old age — other people’s money — these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

Read those paragraphs slowly. Every sentence is operative right now. Privileged enterprise, not free enterprise. This is the diagnosis. The forty-year libertarian project has succeeded in convincing the American public that the choice is between free enterprise and socialism, when the actual choice — the choice the founders understood, the choice FDR understood, the choice that confronts us — is between free enterprise and privileged enterprise. Privileged enterprise is what corporations become when they are released from the trust-doctrine. Privileged enterprise is what produces the economic royalists. Free enterprise is what the trust-doctrine protects, by ensuring that no enterprise is allowed to grow large enough to capture the political authority that disciplines all enterprises.

The new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction. This is the Citizens United line of cases. This is the corporate-personhood doctrine. This is the regulatory capture, the judicial pipeline, the legal sanction that has been wrapped around what is in substance a despotism by men who have purchased their position. The robes are the doctrine. The despotism is what is inside the robes.

The Minute Man problem. The frame is the Revolutionary frame. The fight is the same fight. The royalists then had crowns and titles and chartered companies of the Crown. The royalists now have private municipalities and Network States and SpaceX charters and Bitcoin sovereign-wealth instruments. The robes have changed. The position is the same. The fight is the same.

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The doctrine FDR was reaching back to had been universal at the founding and was, by 1936, almost forgotten. It was the doctrine of the corporation as a trust.

A corporation, as the founders understood it and as American law understood it for the first century of the republic, was not a private entity that the state was somehow obliged to leave alone. A corporation was a privilege granted by a state legislature, for a specific public purpose, for a limited duration, under specific conditions, revocable if the conditions were violated. The legal name for this was the charter, and the charter was understood as a trust. The corporation existed because the public had granted it permission to exist. The permission carried obligations. The obligations were enforceable. The charter could be revoked.

This was not Marxism. The doctrine predated Marx by generations. Hamilton, who is the canonical American defender of corporate enterprise, defended the Bank of the United States precisely on the grounds that its charter would be granted by Congress for the public benefit. Jefferson, who opposed Hamilton on almost every operational question, agreed entirely on this point. Madison’s Federalist 44 treats corporate charters as squarely within legislative authority. John Marshall, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, affirmed that a charter was a contract — but in doing so he confirmed that it was a legislatively granted contract, not an inherent right of the corporators.

The state-level evidence is sharper. Through the entire first half of the nineteenth century, corporate charters in the American states were granted for limited durations — twenty years, thirty years, fifty years, with renewal requiring affirmative legislative action. They were granted for specific purposes — a railroad charter authorized you to build a railroad on a specific route, and the doctrine of ultra vires held that acting outside the chartered purpose was beyond the corporation’s legal capacity. They were granted with conditions — to charge reasonable rates, to provide service to all comers, to maintain works in good repair, to submit to inspection. They were revocable. State legislatures regularly revoked charters when corporations violated their conditions. The historical record contains hundreds of examples of charter revocations through the 1860s.

This was American law. This was the founders’ understanding. This was what the Revolution had been fought to make possible — a republic in which economic enterprise existed under public authority rather than displacing it.

The dismantling came at the end of the nineteenth century and was a coordinated political project. Beginning with New Jersey in 1875 and Delaware in 1899, the states began offering general incorporation — anyone could form a corporation by filing paperwork, for any purpose, for indefinite duration, on the most permissive terms. Delaware in particular engineered a deliberate race to the bottom, writing its corporate code to maximize freedom from public oversight, and most major American corporations are still chartered in Delaware today for precisely this reason. Then Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, in which a court reporter who had previously been a railroad executive inserted into the headnote a declaration that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court itself never ruled on the question. The headnote entered the citation stream as if it had been the holding, and within a generation it had been cited in hundreds of cases as authority for corporate constitutional personhood. The proposition is, on the historical record, a fraud, and it became the foundation of the legal regime we are living under. Then the Lochner era, from 1897 to 1937, in which the Supreme Court invented substantive due process and used it to strike down progressive economic legislation across the country, on the ground that the legislation interfered with the liberty of contract of corporations the Court had just declared to be persons.

By 1900, the older American doctrine had been buried under a new jurisprudence of corporate personhood, corporate constitutional rights, and corporate freedom from public oversight. The burial was the project. The project was funded by the corporations that benefited. The intellectual cover was provided by a legal academy that had been reshaped by corporate money. The historical doctrine was treated, by the new orthodoxy, as if it had never existed. The Gilded Age proceeded to produce the first generation of American economic royalists — the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Morgans — operating in a legal environment that the founders would not have recognized as American.

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FDR’s recovery, beginning in 1933, was a partial restoration of the older doctrine. Glass-Steagall, the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the antitrust enforcement, the regulatory state, the progressive income tax, the estate tax — these were doctrinal restorations as well as practical reforms. The corporation was again understood, in the legal regime that emerged from the New Deal, as a creature of public law, accountable to public purposes, subject to public conditions. The recovery was incomplete. The Delaware regime persisted. The corporate-personhood doctrine was not overturned. But the practical effect of the New Deal regulatory architecture was to discipline concentrated capital in ways the Lochner-era courts had previously prevented, and the discipline held, more or less, for forty years.

The second dismantling began with the Powell Memo in 1971 and proceeded through the apparatus I described in Business Ought Never Be Politics — the donor network, the think tanks, the law-school capture, the Federalist Society pipeline, the Buckley through Citizens United line of cases, the Reagan administrative state, the Clinton-era deregulation, the Roberts Court’s expansion of corporate constitutional rights to include religious exercise and political speech and protection from disclosure. By 2025, the New Deal regulatory architecture had been hollowed out from within, the corporate-personhood doctrine had been expanded into corners the Lochner-era courts would have hesitated to enter, and the wall between concentrated capital and political authority that the Progressives had partially restored was again essentially gone.

The current generation of American economic royalists is what walked through the space where the wall used to be.

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Name them. The naming is the move and the naming has been deferred for too long.

Elon Musk is the cleanest contemporary instance. He has bought a city in Texas and is incorporating it as a municipality under his personal control, with his employees as its residents and his corporate authority as its governance. He runs Starlink as a sovereign communications network and has personally turned it on and off in active war zones based on his private foreign-policy preferences. He has installed himself inside the federal government via the Department of Government Efficiency while simultaneously running the largest private space program in human history under contracts with the same federal government, an arrangement of self-dealing that would have been illegal under the regulatory regimes the Progressive Era and the New Deal constructed and that proceeds in 2026 because those regimes have been dismantled. He has declared, in his more candid moments, that humanity must become multiplanetary, and the operational implication of the multiplanetary frame is that the planetary jurisdiction does not bind him. The Mars project is not metaphorical. The Mars project is Galt’s Gulch in literal three-dimensional space, escape velocity included.

Peter Thiel is the philosophical version of the same project. He has been explicit, in print since his 2009 Cato Unbound essay, that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and the seventeen years since then have been a sustained operational program premised on that belief. He has funded Curtis Yarvin, who has been the most candid postliberal in American intellectual life — the proposal is the patchwork, the world divided into competing corporate sovereignties, each ruled by a CEO-monarch, citizens reduced to customers who can exit but cannot vote. He has funded Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State, the operational version of the Yarvin patchwork. He has funded the seasteading projects and the charter-city movement and the special economic zones in Honduras and elsewhere. He delivered, in March of this year, the Antichrist lectures at the Palazzo Orsini Taverna in Rome — which I addressed at length in Towards a More Perfect Union — and which constituted the most explicit statement of the postliberal program any American figure has yet given in public. The genealogy of the position runs from Carlyle through Maistre through Schmitt through Yarvin through Thiel, and the line of descent is documented and unbroken, as I traced in A Fascism Older Than Fascism. The frame is feudalism. The territories are the holdings. The CEO-monarchs are the lords. The residents are the tenants. The state is the enemy.

The Bitcoin maximalist project is the financial infrastructure for the same vision. Bitcoin in its maximalist form is not a currency. Bitcoin in its maximalist form is a sovereign-wealth instrument for a class of people who intend to hold wealth outside the jurisdiction of any state. The pitch for Bitcoin, when its serious advocates write what they actually believe, is not that it is a better payment system — it is a worse payment system than the existing alternatives. The pitch is that it is a vehicle for exit. Exit from the dollar system. Exit from the regulatory state. Exit from the tax authority. Exit from the political community that the wealth was generated within. The historical condition Bitcoin is being designed to replicate is the condition of the late-medieval European nobility — a class of mobile-wealth-holders who owed allegiance to no king and operated as a parallel sovereignty over the populations they extracted from. Adam Back, identified by John Carreyrou in the New York Times in April as the author of the original Bitcoin protocol, holds a fortune in unmoved coins now worth somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty billion dollars, and the holding is the operational realization of the Sovereign Individual doctrine that David Davidson and William Rees-Mogg laid out in 1997 and that Peter Thiel wrote the foreword to in 2020.

These are competing royalist projects. They do not agree with each other. Musk and Thiel have been on opposite sides of various disputes. The Bitcoin maximalists despise the Ethereum people. The seasteading people think the Mars people are crazy. The Network State people think the seasteading people are unserious. What unites them is not the architecture of the kingdom each is trying to build. What unites them is the rejection of the modern democratic state as the legitimate container of political authority, and the substitution, in its place, of some form of personal or corporate sovereignty modeled on pre-modern arrangements. They are, in FDR’s exact words, carving new dynasties and building new kingdoms upon concentration of control over material things. The vocabulary is FDR’s because the project is the same project FDR was naming. The name has not changed because the thing has not changed.

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State the doctrine plain.

A corporation is a trust. The charter is a public grant. The grant carries obligations. The obligations are enforceable. The grant can be revoked. This is American law. This is the founders’ understanding. This is the doctrine the Revolution made possible and the doctrine the Gilded Age tried to bury and the doctrine the Progressive Era partially recovered and the doctrine the New Deal mostly restored and the doctrine the Powell project has spent forty years trying to bury again.

The doctrine is not Marxism. The libertarian apparatus calls it Marxism because the apparatus needs to make the doctrine unavailable for political use, and Marxism is the closest available curse word in the American political vocabulary. But the doctrine predates Marx by a century and was held by every serious American legal authority of the founding generation. To call Hamilton a Marxist is absurd. To call Madison a Marxist is absurd. To call Marshall, who wrote Dartmouth College, a Marxist, is absurd. To call Theodore Roosevelt, who broke up the trusts, a Marxist, is absurd. To call Brandeis, who wrote Other People’s Money, a Marxist, is absurd. To call Franklin Roosevelt, who saved American capitalism from the very economic royalists who hated him for it, a Marxist, is absurd. The doctrine is American. The doctrine is constitutional. The doctrine is the thing the libertarian apparatus has spent forty years trying to make us forget, and the forgetting is the project, and the remembering is the work.

The doctrine is also not the slippery slope the apparatus claims it is. The American republic operated under the trust-doctrine for the first century of its existence and produced the most dynamic economy in human history. It did not collapse into Soviet collectivism. It did not produce bread lines. It produced railroads, canals, factories, universities, hospitals, the public works that built the country. The trust-doctrine was the operating framework under which all of this was constructed. The slippery-slope warning is a propaganda artifact aimed at a population that has been deliberately kept ignorant of its own legal history. There is no slippery slope. There is only the recovery of the framework the country operated under for a century before the Gilded Age legal coup, and the framework’s recovery is consistent with every variety of economic dynamism the founders intended and the Progressives restored.

The doctrine is, finally, not the framework Galt’s Gulch is set against. Atlas Shrugged presents the choice as between the producer free to keep what he has made and the looter who would take it from him. The choice is false. The actual choice — the choice American constitutional law has been organized around since 1787 — is between the producer who operates inside the political community on terms the political community has set, and the producer who has decided that the political community is beneath him and is constructing his own jurisdiction outside it. The first is a citizen. The second is a royalist. The first deserves the standing the culture extends. The second is the threat the culture exists to defend itself against.

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The recovery is happening, in places, mostly unnoticed.

Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission under Biden was doing this work. Her 2017 Yale Law Journal paper Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox was the manifesto of what is now called the New Brandeis movement, which is exactly the trust-doctrine recovery in twenty-first-century form. Tim Wu at the National Economic Council was doing it. Zephyr Teachout’s Break ‘Em Up and Corruption in America are in this lineage. Sabeel Rahman’s work on the public-utility tradition is in this lineage. Ganesh Sitaraman at Vanderbilt has been writing the legal scholarship that translates the older doctrine into the platform-economy context. State attorneys general have been doing some of this work at the charter-revocation level — the New York attorney general’s attempt to dissolve the National Rifle Association under New York charter law, the California investigations into corporate misconduct under California charter authority, the multistate actions against the opioid manufacturers that have begun to reach the question of whether some of those corporations should continue to exist at all.

These are not Marxist projects. These are recoveries of the original American doctrine. The people doing this work are constitutionalists. They are American legal scholars working within the American legal tradition to recover what the American legal tradition originally held. The work is happening at the law schools, at the state attorneys general, at the regulatory agencies when they are staffed by people who understand the materials, at a small number of think tanks and journals and policy shops, and increasingly in the pieces of legislation that have begun to be drafted by congressional staff who have read the older case law. The work is the operational complement to the wall. The wall is the political project of preventing concentrated capital from converting itself into political power. The trust-doctrine is the legal project of disciplining the corporations through which the conversion is attempted. They are the same project from two angles, and they need each other to succeed.

The middle road I have been describing across this week’s writing runs through this recovery. The road is the road of the substrate, the road of the citizens against the royalists on one flank and the campists I named in The Anti-Imperialism of Fools on the other. The road is constitutional and bipartisan and supra-partisan and it is the road that holds against both forms of the assault on the democratic state — the assault from the right, which proposes to replace the state with corporate sovereignties, and the assault from the left, which proposes to dissolve the state into international solidarities that recognize no political community as legitimate. The middle road insists on the political community. The middle road insists on the trust-doctrine. The middle road insists that economic power is subject to political authority and political authority belongs to citizens.

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FDR’s frame is our frame because the fight is the same fight.

It was royalism then and it is royalism now. The crowns were different. The titles were different. The technologies were different. The 1936 royalist owned a railroad or a bank or a steel mill. The 2026 royalist owns a platform or a launch company or a wallet of unmoved Bitcoin. But the project is the project FDR named — new kingdoms built upon concentration of control over material things, with their privileged princes reaching out for control over Government itself, creating a new despotism and wrapping it in the robes of legal sanction.

The robes this time are the Citizens United doctrine and the corporate-personhood line and the Federalist Society judiciary and the regulatory captures and the platform exemptions and the petro-AI rentier coalition that has purchased the executive branch. The despotism is what is inside the robes. The work is to recognize the robes for what they are and to refuse the legal sanction they are claiming, and to recover the older sanction that runs from the founding through Brandeis through FDR and that is still, in the actual American constitutional tradition, the operative authority on what a corporation is and what its obligations are.

The Revolution did not end. The Revolution was always going to require defending in every generation, against the same enemy, in the same vocabulary. The generation that has to defend it now is ours. The defense is the wall, and the doctrine, and the names FDR gave us when he named the thing for what it is.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a word the American political conversation has been using for forty years that has been doing more damage than any other word in the lexicon, and the word is businessperson.

The word is doing damage because it is being used to describe two entirely different kinds of human beings as though they were the same kind of human being. The first kind is the woman who owns a thirty-person company. She has a payroll. She has customers. She has competitors. She wins or loses on whether the thing she makes is worth what she charges for it. She is inside a market, disciplined by a market, accountable to a market. Whatever else you think of her position, she is doing the thing that capitalism, in its honest defense of itself, claims to reward. She is producing goods or services that other people want enough to pay for, and she is doing so under conditions that allow other people to enter the same market and outcompete her if she stops doing it well.

The second kind is the man who owns enough of the platform on which political speech happens to determine which speech reaches the public. He is not inside a market in any sense his accountant would recognize. He is inside a position. He has spent twenty years accumulating the position. He has spent the last decade insulating the position from competition through regulatory capture, through preferential tax treatment, through the suppression of organized labor, through the purchase of the political class that would otherwise have constrained him. He does not win or lose on whether the thing he produces is worth what he charges for it. He wins by ensuring that no one is in a position to challenge what he charges, that no one is in a position to enter his market, that no one is in a position to tell the public the truth about how he operates, and that the politicians who might pass laws against him are funded out of his discretionary budget rather than the public’s.

These two human beings are not the same human being. The English language has a word for the first. The English language has had a word for the second since Aristotle. The word is oligarch. The word is plutocrat. The word is rentier. The word, in the American constitutional tradition from Jefferson forward, is aristocrat. The word is not businessperson.

Every time the American political conversation calls the second kind by the first kind’s name, the first kind’s legitimacy is being imported into the second kind’s defense. The corner-store owner’s apron is being lifted off her shoulders and draped over the oligarch’s suit. The decency that attends the woman who actually competes in a market is being borrowed, without her permission, by the man who has spent his fortune insulating himself from markets. This is the laundering operation. This is the forty-year project. The vocabulary fight is not a side issue. The vocabulary is the fight.

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The reason the vocabulary fight is the whole fight is that as long as the American conversation is conducted in the wrong vocabulary, the conversation cannot reach the question that actually matters, which is not the question the cable channels argue about.

The question the cable channels argue about is capitalism versus socialism. The question is whether markets or states should allocate resources. The question is whether the marginal tax rate should be higher or lower, whether the regulatory state should be larger or smaller, whether the public sector should provide more services or fewer. This is a real question and it has produced honest arguments on both sides for two centuries. It is not the question that is destroying the American republic. The American republic has survived periods of higher and lower taxation, larger and smaller regulatory states, more and fewer public services, all within the constitutional order. The constitutional order did not collapse over the marginal tax rate. The constitutional order will not be saved by getting the marginal tax rate right.

The question that is destroying the American republic is whether the men who have accumulated concentrated economic power are allowed to convert that economic power into political power. This question runs perpendicular to the capitalism-socialism axis. You can be a capitalist on the right side of this question — in fact, if you are an honest capitalist, you have to be, because oligarchy is what markets become when the political authority cannot constrain them, and oligarchy is the death of the very competition the capitalist claims to value. You can be a socialist on the wrong side of this question — there have been many, in the history of left politics, who supposed that concentrated economic power would be acceptable as long as it was concentrated in hands they trusted, and they have been wrong every time. The axis that matters is not the axis cable news argues about. The axis that matters is the axis between constitutionalism and oligarchy, between the position that political authority belongs to citizens equally and the position that political authority can be purchased by those who have accumulated the resources to purchase it.

The argument I am making in this piece is that this is the only axis that matters right now. The capitalism-versus-socialism argument is a distraction maintained at considerable expense by people whose interest is in keeping the real argument off the table. The real argument is older than capitalism and older than socialism. The real argument is as old as the polis. Aristotle named it. The framers of the American constitution named it. Every serious constitutional theorist in the western tradition has named it. The argument is whether the political authority can hold the prior claim over the economic actors, or whether the economic actors can purchase the political authority. There is no third position. There is no compromise. The wall holds or the wall does not hold. When the wall does not hold, the polity is no longer a republic. It may retain the forms of a republic for a generation or two — the elections, the courts, the legislative chambers, the constitutional text — but the substance is gone. The substance is gone because the men who own the resources have purchased the elections and captured the courts and rented the legislative chambers and instrumentalized the constitutional text for their own protection. The forms persist. The substance is oligarchy.

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The American constitutional tradition has always understood this. The capitalism-versus-socialism argument has obscured the tradition, but the tradition is there in the founding documents and the foundational arguments and the entire serious literature of American self-government from 1787 to the day before yesterday.

Adam Smith, whom every American conservative claims as a founding father of the position they hold, spent half of Wealth of Nations warning that merchants would always combine in conspiracy against the public if they were not prevented from doing so by political authority that was independent of them. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Smith was not naive about what unconstrained capital would do to a market. Smith knew that a market without political authority strong enough to police it would not remain a market for long. It would become a position, and the position would become a rent, and the rent would become an aristocracy. Smith’s argument against mercantilism was not an argument against the state. It was an argument against a state that had been captured by merchants. He wanted the state restored to the public, not abolished, because he understood that without a public state the merchants would simply be the state, and the freedom Smith cared about would be the first thing they liquidated.

Thomas Jefferson, in his correspondence with Madison and Adams over decades, was explicit about what would destroy the American experiment if it were not constantly fought against. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. The aristocracy of our monied corporations. The phrase is from 1816. The thing he was warning against was the thing that has now happened. The dare he predicted is the dare we have lost.

James Madison, in Federalist 10, gave the most analytically careful statement of the problem in the founding literature. The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man, and the most enduring source of faction is the various and unequal distribution of property. Madison did not write Federalist 10 to celebrate factions. He wrote it to explain how the structure of the constitution would attempt to prevent the most dangerous faction — the faction of concentrated economic interest — from capturing the federal government. The structure of the constitution is an answer to the question of how to keep concentrated capital from converting itself into political dominion. The answer Madison proposed — separation of powers, federalism, the extended republic, the multiplicity of competing interests — was the answer of someone who took the problem with full seriousness and who knew the answer would have to be defended in every generation if it was going to hold.

Theodore Roosevelt, in his Malefactors of Great Wealth speech in 1907, gave the canonical Progressive Era statement. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. TR was not a socialist. TR was a Republican president who had been a cowboy and a hunter and a colonel and a trust-buster. TR understood that the survival of the American constitutional order required the active maintenance of the boundary between concentrated capital and political authority, and that the maintenance required state power capable of breaking up the trusts when the trusts grew large enough to threaten self-government. The Republican party of 1907 understood this. The Republican party of 1907 is not the Republican party of 2026.

Louis Brandeis, in Other People’s Money and in his Supreme Court opinions and in his lifelong campaign against what he called the curse of bigness, made the operational case. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. The sentence is the cleanest statement in the American tradition of the doctrine I am defending in this piece. Brandeis did not say that we may have democracy or we may have markets. He did not say that we may have democracy or we may have capitalism. He said democracy is incompatible with concentrated wealth, and he said it because concentrated wealth will, by its nature and not by any individual malice, convert itself into political power until the political authority of the people has been displaced. Brandeis’s career was the operational answer to Madison’s analytical question. The answer was antitrust enforcement, securities regulation, banking regulation, labor law, the progressive income tax, the estate tax. The answer was the wall. The wall that Brandeis and the Progressives built and that the New Deal reinforced and that the Great Society completed was the wall that prevented the American republic from becoming what every prior commercial republic in human history had become, which was an oligarchy with constitutional forms.

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The wall was torn down. The tearing down took forty years and it was conducted by a political project whose participants understood at every step what they were doing and what the consequences would be.

The project’s intellectual origins are documentable. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman built the academic argument that the regulatory state was a slippery slope to totalitarianism. The argument was wrong on its premises and catastrophic in its application but it provided cover for what would otherwise have been a transparent class project. The Powell Memo of 1971, written by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, laid out the operational plan. American business needed to fund think tanks, capture law schools, train a generation of judges, build an alternative media ecosystem, and recapture the federal government from the New Deal coalition that had been running it for forty years. The plan was executed. The funding came from the same families and corporate interests that would benefit from the wall coming down. The Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network. The think tanks were built — Heritage, Cato, AEI, the Federalist Society. The law schools were captured, one chair at a time. The judges were trained. The media was built. The government was recaptured.

The legal demolition proceeded through a series of decisions whose names are now standard vocabulary among constitutional lawyers who understand what was done. Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 ruled that money is speech and that the wealthy may therefore spend without limit on their own political advocacy. The decision took down a major brick. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978 extended first-amendment protections to corporate political speech. Another brick. McConnell v. FEC, Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014, the Speechnow line. The bricks came down faster as the appointees from the captured judicial pipeline reached the federal bench. The Roberts Court, by 2014, had completed the legal demolition of American campaign finance law. There is now no effective limit on the amount of money the wealthy may spend to determine election outcomes in the United States. The wealthy spend the money. The election outcomes are determined. The republic notices that something has gone wrong but cannot quite name what.

The regulatory demolition proceeded in parallel. The Reagan administration began the systematic underfunding and capture of the regulatory agencies the New Deal had built. Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that had separated commercial and investment banking, was repealed in 1999 under Clinton. The repeal made possible the financial concentration that produced the 2008 crisis, which produced the bailouts, which produced the further concentration. Antitrust enforcement, which had been the spine of the wall since Sherman, was hollowed out by the Bork-influenced consumer-welfare standard that ruled that monopoly was acceptable as long as prices stayed low. Prices stayed low. The monopolies grew. The platforms acquired the share of public communication they now hold. The pharmaceutical industry consolidated. The airline industry consolidated. The publishing industry consolidated. The wall between concentrated capital and political authority dissolved because the concentrated capital had grown large enough to dissolve it.

Labor law was the other great wall. The Wagner Act of 1935 had established the legal right of workers to organize. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had begun the rollback. The Reagan administration’s destruction of PATCO in 1981 was the signal that the federal government would no longer enforce the labor protections it had nominally maintained. Right-to-work laws spread. Organizing rates collapsed. By 2025, private-sector union membership in the United States was below six percent. The countervailing power that organized labor had provided against organized capital in the mid-century settlement no longer existed. The wall had lost one of its largest reinforcing members.

By the time Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the petro-AI rentier coalition behind him, there was no wall. There was the constitutional text. There were the elections. There were the courts. But the substance of the wall — the financial regulations, the antitrust enforcement, the campaign finance limits, the labor protections, the press independence, the academic freedom that produced the analyses required to see what was happening — had been demolished, one brick at a time, over forty years, by a project that had announced its intentions in the Powell Memo and executed those intentions with the patience and discipline that only well-funded long campaigns can sustain. The petro-AI rentier coalition did not have to break down a wall. They walked through a space where a wall had once been.

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This is the position we are in. The first cabinet of the second Trump administration is a cap table. The largest single fortune in human history is being managed from inside a department of the federal government invented for the purpose. The platforms on which American political speech happens are owned by men who have explicitly aligned themselves with the political project that benefits them. The press that would have reported what they were doing has been bought, threatened, or marginalized to the point where its reporting cannot reach the audience that would act on it. The judiciary that would have constrained them has been packed, over forty years, with appointees from the Federalist Society pipeline whose entire career incentive structure runs through the same network that benefits from the absence of the wall. The Congress that might have passed laws against them is funded by them and dares not move. The presidency is theirs.

This is what the American political conversation should be about. It is not what the American political conversation is about. The American political conversation is about whether the marginal tax rate should be a few points higher or lower, whether the federal budget should be a few points larger or smaller, whether transgender athletes should compete in women’s sports, whether some immigrant deserves to be deported, whether some university should be punished for some speech act by some student. These are the arguments the petro-AI rentier coalition is content to let us have. These are the arguments the captured media will host. These are the arguments the captured political class will perform. The argument the coalition will not let us have, because it is the only argument that threatens them, is the argument about whether they should be allowed to occupy the position they have purchased.

The argument is the wall argument. The argument is whether business ought to be politics. The argument is whether the man who has accumulated three hundred billion dollars should be allowed to run a department of the federal government because he funded the campaign that elected the president. The argument is whether the platforms on which speech happens should be allowed to be owned by men whose political project depends on suppressing certain speech. The argument is whether the cabinet should be drawn from the donor class that funded the presidency that nominated the cabinet. The argument is whether the regulatory agencies should be staffed by the industries they are supposed to regulate. The argument is whether the courts should be filled with judges selected by a private organization funded by the parties that have business before the courts. The argument is whether the press should be owned by men whose interest is in not having the press do its work.

The argument is the only argument. Everything else is a distraction maintained by people whose interest is in the maintenance of the distraction.

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So state the doctrine plain. Business ought never be politics.

A business is a legitimate human activity. A business produces goods or services that other human beings want and trades them in markets that other businesses are free to enter. A business is disciplined by the willingness of customers to pay and by the willingness of competitors to undercut and by the law that requires it to deliver what it promised and pay its workers what it owed and treat its customers honestly and report its taxes truthfully. A business operating within these constraints is one of the most valuable forms of human cooperation we have ever invented. The corner-store owner is a business. The thirty-person company is a business. The family farm is a business. The neighborhood restaurant is a business. The independent press is a business. The local manufacturer is a business. The freelance designer is a business. These businesses are the productive substrate of any healthy economy and the cultural substrate of any healthy political community. They deserve the moral standing the culture extends to them. They earn the standing every day they operate, because every day they operate they are subject to the disciplines that make the standing meaningful.

A business becomes something else the moment its principals begin to use the resources of the business to purchase political outcomes. The transition is the corruption. The transition has a name. The American name for it, since Jefferson, has been aristocracy. The European name for it, since Aristotle, has been oligarchy. The Russian name for it, since the 1990s, has been oligarch unmodified, which is the name that has migrated into English because the thing it names has migrated into the American republic. The current American instance is the most fully developed oligarchy the republic has ever produced. It is more concentrated than the Gilded Age, by every measure economists use. It is more politically active than the Gilded Age. It is more ideologically self-conscious than the Gilded Age. The robber barons mostly wanted to be left alone to extract their rents. The current oligarchs want to be the state. Some of them, in their more candid moments at private conferences and in their books and in their philosophers’ lectures in Roman palazzi, have said so explicitly.

The doctrine is not difficult. The doctrine is not radical. The doctrine is the unbroken position of the entire serious American constitutional tradition from Madison through Brandeis. The doctrine is the operating assumption of every functioning constitutional democracy in the world. The doctrine is the precondition for self-government. The doctrine is what the American political project was originally for.

Business ought never be politics. The thirty-person company owner has every right to be involved in her community’s political life as a citizen, on equal terms with other citizens, with the influence available to one human being and the vote available to one voter. The owner of a controlling stake in the platform on which political speech happens does not have the right to use the platform to determine the outcome of the elections in which his interests are at stake. The first is a citizen exercising her citizenship. The second is an oligarch exercising his oligarchy. The line between them is the line the entire American constitutional order is supposed to defend, and the defense of that line is the only political project that matters in the current moment.

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The clearest current illustration of what the absence of the wall makes possible is the metering of intelligence.

Sam Altman said it on stage at the BlackRock US Infrastructure Summit in Washington on March 11 of this year, in front of an audience whose business is the allocation of the largest pool of private capital in human history. We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter. He said this as a pitch. He said it to the people whose money he was asking for. He said it because he understood that the audience would hear it not as a warning but as an opportunity, which is the correct reading of how the audience did in fact hear it.

Walk through what the sentence proposes. Intelligence is a utility. Intelligence is the capacity that our entire civilization has, since the species began, treated as the defining constitutive faculty of being human. The capacity has been delivered, throughout that history, by language and by writing and by the printing press and by the school and by the library and by the internet in its early form, and each of these delivery systems was, in its mature form, organized as a commons or as a public utility precisely because the species understood that the capacity to think together was the precondition for self-government. The proposal is to reorganize the delivery as a private rental. The proposal is to install a meter between human beings and the cognitive operations they have been performing for themselves for two hundred thousand years. The meter is owned. The owner sets the rate. The rate is collected on every operation that flows through the meter, every query, every paragraph drafted, every document summarized, every student’s homework, every doctor’s note, every brief, every memo, every email, every search. The meter compounds. The rent funds the next round of compute. The next round of compute deepens the moat. The moat ensures that no competitor can install a meter of comparable capacity. The owner’s meter becomes the meter. By the time the civilization notices what has happened, the meter is load-bearing. The workflow of every institution has been restructured around the meter. The children have been educated on the metered system. The businesses are being run on the metered system. The courts and the hospitals and the legislatures are being briefed on documents drafted on the metered system. The meter cannot be removed without bringing down everything that has been built on top of it. The owner of the meter owns the cognitive infrastructure of the civilization.

Altman also, in the same conversation, referenced the old nuclear-energy phrase too cheap to meter, offered as the long-term aspiration. The slippage between the two halves of the sentence is the rhetorical trick of the entire AI industry. The utopian aspiration — intelligence as cheap as the air, abundant for everyone — provides cover for the actual extraction, which is metered rent on a faculty the species used to consider constitutive of being human. The aspiration will never arrive because the aspiration is not what is being built. The meter is what is being built. The meter is what the BlackRock audience was being asked to fund. The aspiration is what the press release will say.

This is what the absence of the wall makes possible. Forty years ago there would have been antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department who would have read Altman’s sentence and opened a file the same week. There would have been senators who would have called hearings. There would have been a press that would have asked, plainly, on what authority a single private entity proposes to install itself as the metering apparatus on the cognitive infrastructure of the species, and what regulatory framework will govern the rate it charges, and what public interest standard will discipline its operations, and what democratic accountability will attach to its decisions about which queries it will and will not process. None of this is happening. The antitrust apparatus has been dismantled. The senators have been funded. The press is owned by men who have aligned themselves with the project. The regulatory framework is being written, where it is being written at all, by lobbyists employed by the entities the framework is supposed to constrain. The meter is being installed in real time, in front of us, with the full participation of the political and financial apparatus that the wall used to constrain, and there is no mechanism currently operative in American constitutional life that is capable of stopping it.

This is the doctrine made operational. This is what business becoming politics looks like at the moment of installation. The man who proposes to sell intelligence on a meter is not a businessperson. The thirty-person company owner who sells shoes is a businessperson. The man at the BlackRock summit is something else. The English language has had a word for what he is for two thousand five hundred years. The word is not the word the press uses for him. The press uses founder and CEO and visionary and entrepreneur. The word the situation requires is aristocrat, in the Jeffersonian sense, or oligarch, in the Aristotelian sense, or — for the specific kind of aristocrat who proposes to install a permanent toll on a public faculty — monopolist, in the sense the Sherman Act was passed to address before the Sherman Act was disassembled.

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The reconstruction of the wall will take a generation. The demolition took forty years and the reconstruction will take longer because the materials are harder to assemble than they were to disassemble. The financial regulations have to be rewritten in the face of an industry that owns the writing process. The antitrust enforcement has to be rebuilt in the face of a judiciary that has been trained to oppose it. The campaign finance limits have to be reimposed against a Supreme Court that has ruled them unconstitutional. The labor protections have to be restored against a political coalition that has spent forty years dismantling them. The press independence has to be re-funded in the face of platforms whose entire business model depends on its absence. The judicial pipeline has to be retrained in the face of a Federalist Society network that has had a forty-year head start.

None of this is impossible. All of it is the work. The work is what citizenship looks like when the constitutional order is in danger and the prior generation’s solutions have been dismantled by the prior generation’s failures of vigilance. The work falls to the people who hold the doctrine and who can articulate why the doctrine matters and who can organize the political coalitions required to begin the reconstruction. The work is bipartisan because the doctrine is bipartisan. The work is supra-partisan because the doctrine is constitutional. The work is unifying because the people who hold the doctrine are in both parties and in neither and across every demographic and economic position in American life, and the only reason they do not yet know they are a coalition is that the captured political conversation has not allowed them to find each other.

I am writing these pages partly to help them find each other. The middle road I have been describing across this week’s writing is the road of the people who hold the constitutional position against the oligarchic capture, against the postliberal project, against the petro-AI rentier coalition that has purchased the executive branch, against the conflations and the laundering operations and the vocabulary games that keep the real argument from happening. The road is the road of the substrate. The road is the road of the people who still believe that political authority belongs to citizens and not to dollar amounts. The road is the third American founding, when it comes, and the founding will come because the alternative is the end of the republic and the republic still has enough citizens in it who are not yet ready to let it end.

Business ought never be politics. That is the doctrine. That is the wall. That is the work.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I have been holding this in for over a year. I have probably been holding it in for longer than that. The holding-in has become its own moral failure, and I want to undo it this morning before I let myself talk myself out of it again.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist. He has been a fascist for a long time. The Israeli political system survived him, repeatedly, for thirty years because the institutional structures of the Israeli state were strong enough to contain him. The institutional structures have been weakened, deliberately, by his coalition. The weakening is the whole point. The weakening is what fascism does, in every country it takes hold in, and the Israeli case is not exceptional. The Israeli case is the most recent and one of the most fully documented examples of a constitutional democracy being captured from within by a leader and a coalition who view the constitutional order as an obstacle to the project they wish to execute.

I want to walk through what they have done. I want to walk through it in the same voice I have been walking through the postliberal project here in the United States, because the projects are structurally the same project. The donors are different but the form is the same. The vocabulary is different but the program is the same. The leader is different but the type is the same.

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Netanyahu is under indictment in three separate cases, brought by the Israeli Attorney General in November 2019. Case 1000 charges him with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in his receipt of luxury goods from the businessmen Arnon Milchan and James Packer in exchange for official favors. Case 2000 charges him with attempting to negotiate favorable coverage from the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth in exchange for legislation that would weaken the publisher’s competitor Israel Hayom. Case 4000 charges him with directing regulatory favors to the telecommunications mogul Shaul Elovitch in exchange for favorable coverage on the Walla news site. The trial began in May 2020 and has been ongoing, with every available procedural delay, ever since. Netanyahu has not been acquitted. The trial has not ended. The Attorney General who brought the indictment was the subject of a sustained campaign by Netanyahu’s coalition to remove her from office, on grounds that any reasonable observer would recognize as transparently retaliatory. This is what a criminal head of government does. He attacks the prosecutorial apparatus that has brought him to account. The American instance of the same move is fresh enough in our minds that we do not need to dwell on it.

In January 2023, the Netanyahu coalition introduced a package of judicial reforms whose purpose was the subordination of the Israeli Supreme Court to the political majority of the moment. The package would have eliminated the reasonableness doctrine by which the Court had long reviewed executive decisions for arbitrariness, would have given the governing coalition control over the Judicial Selection Committee, and would have allowed the Knesset to override Supreme Court decisions by a simple majority of sixty-one. The package was, structurally, the dismantling of the only meaningful institutional check on executive power in the Israeli system. Israel has no formal constitution. Israel has no upper legislative chamber. Israel has no federalism. The Supreme Court, with its judicial-review authority and its reasonableness doctrine, was the one institution that stood between an Israeli Prime Minister with a Knesset majority and the kind of authority that, in other democracies, requires the suspension of constitutional order to achieve.

The Israeli public understood what was being done. Beginning in January 2023 and continuing for nine months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, week after week, in what became the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history. Reserve pilots refused to report for duty. Reserve officers in elite intelligence units announced they would not serve. Tech executives moved capital out of the country. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor federation, threatened a general strike. The President of Israel publicly warned that the country was approaching civil war. The judicial coup was, by the autumn of 2023, on the edge of being abandoned because the institutional and civic resistance to it had become unmanageable.

Then October 7 happened.

I want to be careful here. The Hamas attack of October 7 was a real attack by a real organization. It killed twelve hundred Israelis, most of them civilians, in a single day. It took two hundred and fifty hostages, most of them civilians, into Gaza. It was the worst single day of Jewish death since the Holocaust. The grief of the Israeli people in the weeks and months that followed was real, and the demand for a response was, in any historical comparison, justified. I am not the writer who is going to tell you the attack was not what it was.

But I am the writer who is going to tell you what the Netanyahu government did with the attack, and what they did with it was the Bush-and-Cheney move I described yesterday in the piece on the war on terror. They took a real attack and they used it to relaunch a project that the attack had only adjacent relationship to. The project was the dismantling of the Israeli judicial check, the destruction of Palestinian political agency, the de facto annexation of the West Bank, the demolition of Gaza as a habitable territory, the suppression of internal Israeli dissent, and the political rehabilitation of a Prime Minister who, on October 6, had been ten weeks away from being forced out of office by his own people’s mobilization against him.

The intelligence failures of October 7 were Netanyahu’s responsibility. He had spent the previous year strategically empowering Hamas in Gaza, on the explicit theory that a strong Hamas in Gaza would prevent the emergence of a unified Palestinian political authority that could press credible claims for a two-state solution. He had, since 2019, authorized the transfer of suitcases of Qatari cash into Gaza to keep Hamas in power. He had stripped the Egyptian border of intelligence assets in the months before the attack. He had ignored warnings from female border-spotters whose reports of unusual Hamas behavior in the weeks before October 7 went unactioned. The Israeli intelligence community has, in its post-attack inquiries, documented these failures in detail. Netanyahu has refused to allow a formal commission of inquiry, of the kind that followed every previous Israeli intelligence catastrophe from the Yom Kippur War onward, because such an inquiry would document, on the public record, that the worst single day of Jewish death since the Holocaust happened on his watch and partly because of his policies.

He used the attack instead. He used it to suspend the judicial-reform crisis without resolving it. He used it to bring the most explicit Jewish-supremacist parties in Israeli political history — Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism — into the senior cabinet positions controlling police, prisons, settlements, and the territorial administration of the West Bank. He used it to launch what has become, by the conservative count of the Lancet and the slightly higher count of the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry whose figures the Israeli Defense Forces themselves rely on for operational planning, the death of somewhere between forty and one hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, including a documented count of over fifteen thousand children. He used it to displace ninety percent of the Gazan population from their homes. He used it to destroy the agricultural infrastructure, the water infrastructure, the medical infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, and the housing stock of a territory of two million people. He used it to begin the policy of induced starvation that the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has, since early 2024, formally classified as famine in northern Gaza.

He used it, finally, to drag the United States of America into a war with Iran on February 28 of this year. The bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites was a Netanyahu project, executed under American auspices because the Israeli air force could not complete it without American refueling and American bunker-busters. The Trump administration agreed to the operation because the Trump administration had been captured, through the same petro-AI rentier coalition I have been documenting in these pieces, by the same forces that had captured the Netanyahu government. The Saudis and the Emiratis had wanted Iran’s regional position broken for thirty years. The Israeli right had wanted Iran’s nuclear program destroyed for the same span. The American Christian-Zionist political base of the Trump coalition had wanted a war with Iran as part of an eschatological program whose details would embarrass them to defend in public. The bombing went forward. The quagmire opened. The American casualties of the war that has followed are, this morning, four hundred and rising. The Iranian casualties are in the low thousands and rising. The regional escalation is not yet over. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed twice. The price of crude has not been below one hundred fifty dollars a barrel in eleven weeks. The American voter, who did not want this war and was not consulted about whether the United States should fight it, is paying for it at the gas pump and in the casualty lists.

This is what Netanyahu did with October 7. This is what a fascist leader does with a national crisis. He uses it.

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I want to address directly the thing that the reader of this piece may be saying back to it, because the thing the reader is saying back to it is the thing the entire structure of American Jewish institutional life has trained the reader to say, and I do not blame the reader for saying it. The thing the reader is saying back is that the kind of criticism I am leveling at Netanyahu is the kind of criticism that gives cover to antisemitism. The thing the reader is saying back is that even if every fact I have just rehearsed is true, the saying of these facts in public is itself a moral problem because the audience for the saying of them will include people whose hatred of Jews is the real driver of their interest in hearing the facts said. I want to address this argument head-on, because I have heard it from people I love for the entire fifteen years that Netanyahu has been the dominant figure of Israeli politics.

The proposition that criticism of the Netanyahu government is antisemitic is a proposition that has been manufactured, over fifteen years, by the Netanyahu apparatus itself and by the network of American Jewish institutions that has, through a combination of donor capture and ideological alignment, become a delivery mechanism for the Netanyahu government’s preferred framing of Israeli political reality. The proposition has been promoted by AIPAC, by the Anti-Defamation League under Jonathan Greenblatt’s leadership, by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs through its various American grantees, by the Adelson-funded Israel American Council, and by the larger network of foundations and donor-advised funds that has, over the last twenty years, made Israel-policy alignment a condition of access to Jewish institutional life in the United States. The proposition is false. The proposition is harmful. The proposition is, in its long-term effect, one of the most dangerous things any American Jewish institution has ever done to the security of American Jews.

Let me say why.

Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews as Jews. It is the ascription, to Jews collectively, of characteristics or guilts that have nothing to do with what any individual Jew has done. It is the conspiracy theory that imagines a Jewish hand behind every economic dislocation, every cultural change, every political development the antisemite dislikes. It is the genocidal mania that produced the pogroms of the nineteenth century, the Dreyfus affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Nuremberg Laws, the Wannsee Conference, the death camps, and the Pittsburgh and Poway and Colleyville and Jersey City and Monsey attacks of our own decade. Antisemitism is a real phenomenon. Antisemitism is rising in the United States. Antisemitism kills Jews.

Criticism of the Netanyahu government is something else. Criticism of the Netanyahu government is the recognition that a specific government, led by a specific man, in coalition with specific parties, has done specific things — judicial-coup, criminal indictments, induced famine in Gaza, dragging America into an Iran war — that are wrong on their own terms and that no person of conscience can defend. The criticism applies to Netanyahu. The criticism applies to Ben-Gvir. The criticism applies to Smotrich. The criticism applies to the coalition that brought them to power and to the international apparatus, including its substantial American Jewish component, that has shielded them from accountability. The criticism does not apply to the Jewish people. The criticism does not apply to Judaism. The criticism does not apply to Israel as a state. The criticism does not apply to the Israeli people, hundreds of thousands of whom were in the streets opposing Netanyahu’s project before October 7 and many of whom continue, against extraordinary pressure, to oppose it now.

The conflation of these two things — antisemitism and anti-Netanyahuism — is a strategic move by the Netanyahu apparatus and its American allies. The strategic purpose of the conflation is to disable criticism of the Israeli government by making the criticism socially and professionally costly for anyone who undertakes it. The mechanism is simple. You criticize Netanyahu. The institutional apparatus calls you an antisemite. The cost of the antisemitism label is, in current American institutional life, severe enough to end careers, terminate funding relationships, remove people from boards, and exclude them from polite society. The cost is high enough that most people, faced with the choice, decline to undertake the criticism. The criticism is therefore not undertaken. The Netanyahu government is therefore not criticized. The conflation has done its work.

But the conflation has a second-order effect that the people running the conflation appear not to have fully internalized. The conflation cheapens the word antisemitism by attaching it indiscriminately to people who are not antisemites. When the word antisemitism is used to describe Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, or Peter Beinart, who is Jewish, or any of the hundreds of Israeli journalists and academics and reservists and former generals who have been publicly criticizing Netanyahu for years, the word loses its diagnostic precision. When the word is used to describe non-Jewish public figures whose criticisms of Israeli policy are within the normal range of foreign-policy disagreement, the word’s gravity is dissipated.

And here is the danger. When the word antisemitism has been dissipated by overuse, the word no longer carries the moral weight required to mobilize the political coalition that is needed to confront actual antisemitism when it arises. When actual antisemites arise — and they have arisen, in our own decade, on our own soil, with rifles, in synagogues — the people who would normally be the first responders, the people whose moral seriousness about Jewish safety would have been the natural foundation for a defense, have been trained to roll their eyes at the word. They have been trained to roll their eyes because the word has been so frequently and so transparently misused that they have come to assume any deployment of it is in bad faith. They are wrong to assume this. But the assumption has been earned, on a thousand small occasions when the word was used to suppress legitimate political criticism rather than to identify real bigotry.

The American Jewish institutional apparatus has, in service of the Netanyahu government, weakened the antisemitism diagnostic that American Jewish safety depends on. This is the strategic catastrophe. This is the thing that, when Jewish historians look back on this period in fifty years, they will identify as one of the great institutional failures of American Jewish life. The institutions whose mission was the protection of Jews have, in service of an Israeli political project that most American Jews do not support, allowed the word antisemitism to become the discursive equivalent of a small boy crying wolf.

The wolf is real. The wolf is at the door. The wolf is more dangerous than it has been in eighty years. And the boy who would have warned the village has been crying wolf so often, in the service of a political project, that the village has stopped listening.

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I want to claim a tradition, here, because the claim is the only ground I can stand on as a Gentile writer about to spend the next several paragraphs in territory that does not natively belong to me.

The tradition is the prophetic tradition. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible — Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — were the original critics of corrupt Israeli political power written from within love of the people and the covenant. They did not say the things they said because they hated Israel. They said the things they said because they loved Israel, because they could see what its kings were doing to it, and because they understood that the only way to save the people was to tell the truth about the people who were destroying it from above.

Amos said it. Amos stood at the royal sanctuary of Bethel and told Jeroboam’s high priest that the sanctuary itself was an abomination because the kingdom that sustained it had become an instrument of injustice. I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies… But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Jeremiah said it. Jeremiah stood in the gate of the Temple and told the people of Jerusalem that the Temple itself would not save them if they continued to oppress the stranger and the widow and the orphan. Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these.

Isaiah said it. Isaiah wrote that the new moons and Sabbaths and convocations of an unjust regime were a stench in the nostrils of the God who had given them. Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.

The prophets loved Israel. The prophets were Israel. The prophets spoke against the kings of Israel because the kings of Israel were destroying the people the prophets loved. The speaking was the love. The speaking was, in its own moment, treated as treason by the kings and the courts and the priestly establishments that profited from the kings. The speaking was, in many cases, paid for with the prophets’ careers and in some cases with their lives. Jeremiah was put in the stocks. Jeremiah was thrown into the cistern. Jeremiah lived to weep, in the Lamentations, over the ruins of the city he had warned and that had not listened.

This is not antisemitism. This is the oldest love-language Judaism has produced. This is the love-language Jeremiah used in the Lamentations, sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem and weeping for what the kings had brought down upon her. This is the love-language the rabbis preserved in the Mishnah and the Talmud when they argued, century after century, about what a just polity owed to the stranger and the poor and the powerless. This is the love-language the great American Jewish prophetic voices of the twentieth century — Abraham Joshua Heschel marching at Selma, Hannah Arendt writing about Eichmann, Michael Walzer working out the just-war tradition for Jews, Tony Judt arguing for a binational state, Peter Beinart insisting in Jewish Currents on the obligation to tell the truth — practiced for fifty years against the apparatus that called every one of them, at one point or another, a self-hating Jew.

Beinart in particular I want to name, because Beinart has done, in long form and with documented argument and at terrible personal cost, what these pages are a much smaller version of. Beinart has been read out of every mainstream American Jewish institution he was once welcome in. He has lost speaking invitations, board seats, friendships, family relationships. He has continued, week after week in Jewish Currents and in his books and in his lectures, to insist that the moral health of the Jewish people requires the honest accounting of what Israeli policy has become and what the American Jewish institutional apparatus has been doing in its name. He has done this as an Orthodox Jew, as a religious Zionist whose Zionism is the prophetic Zionism of Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber, as a man who loves the Jewish people with a love that any reasonable observer can see in every paragraph he writes. The institutional apparatus has called him an antisemite. The institutional apparatus is wrong. The institutional apparatus is doing damage to the Jewish people every day it persists in being wrong about this.

I am a Gentile. I have no standing in the internal Jewish argument the way Beinart has. But I am the friend of Jews, I am a beneficiary of the Jewish prophetic tradition that has shaped my own writing more than any other source outside the gospels, and I am a citizen of a country that is currently being dragged into a Middle Eastern war by an Israeli government that should not have lasted past the autumn of 2023 if the institutional apparatus around it had been honest. I have a stake. I have a voice. I am using both this morning.

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The things I want for Israel are the things I want for the United States.

I want Israel to be a constitutional democracy with an independent judiciary, a free press, an accountable executive, and a political culture that can survive bad leaders without being destroyed by them. I want Israel to be a state in which the Jewish people are safe and in which non-Jewish citizens of the state are equal before the law. I want Israel to be a state at peace with its neighbors, including the Palestinian people, through whatever institutional arrangement — two states, one democratic state, federation, confederation — the people involved can negotiate. I want Israel to be the kind of state that the people who founded it in 1948 hoped it would become, which was not the state Netanyahu has been building. The founders of Israel were, in their large majority, secular socialists who imagined a Jewish homeland that would also be a democratic society and a beacon of the prophetic ethical tradition. They were not the Kahanists. They were not the settler-movement militants. They were not the corrupt criminal lawyer-king who has spent thirty years using their inheritance for his personal political survival.

I want for Israel what I want for the United States. I want the constitutional order to hold. I want the criminals to be held accountable. I want the judicial apparatus to function. I want the press to operate. I want the universities to teach without intimidation. I want the protests in the streets, which have been the moral pulse of both countries in this decade, to continue and to grow. I want the third American founding I described in the piece on the antebellum cornerstone, and I want the equivalent Israeli reckoning that will, when it comes, be the third Israeli founding — the one that finally settles what kind of country Israel is going to be on the day after Netanyahu, on the day after his coalition, on the day after the apparatus that has been protecting them is finally held to account.

I believe this reckoning is coming. I believe it because the Israeli people are, in their large majority, not Netanyahu. I believe it because the protests of 2023 were real. I believe it because the reservists who refused to serve under the judicial-coup regime were real. I believe it because the Israeli press, even under the pressure the Netanyahu government has put on it, has continued to produce real journalism — Haaretz, +972 Magazine, Local Call, the investigative work of journalists like Ronen Bergman and Yuval Abraham — that has documented what their own government has been doing. I believe it because, in every Israeli election since 2019, the majority of the Israeli population has voted for parties opposed to Netanyahu, and the only reason he has remained in power is the structural distortions of the coalition arithmetic and the specific kingmaking of the small Jewish-supremacist parties that no previous Israeli Prime Minister would have allowed into the governing coalition.

The Israeli reckoning is coming. When it comes, the Israelis who fought against Netanyahu for years will need allies. The American Jews who fought against the apparatus that protected him will need allies. The Palestinians who survive Gaza will need allies. The American citizens of every faith and none who refused, throughout this period, to allow the conflation of legitimate criticism with antisemitism to silence them — those citizens will be the allies the reckoning needs.

I am trying to be one of those allies this morning. I am trying to do it the way the prophets did it — by speaking the truth in love, by addressing it to the people I want to be heard by rather than to the abstraction of an enemy I want to defeat. I am trying to do it without bitterness toward the readers whose instinct to flinch at these words has been trained into them by an apparatus they did not build and largely cannot see. The flinching is not their fault. The flinching is the apparatus working as designed. The undoing of the flinching is the slow patient labor of pieces like this one — pieces that say the obvious thing carefully, with documentation, with affection, and with the prophetic tradition’s standing under-girding the words.

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I want to close with a passage from Jeremiah, because Jeremiah is the prophet who best understood what it costs to love a people enough to tell them the truth about their kings.

Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people. Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission, till the Lord look down, and behold from heaven.

That is the voice. That is the love. That is the eye that does not stop weeping because the destruction is real and the prophet who loves the people is the one who cannot look away from what their kings are doing to them.

I do not have Jeremiah’s standing. I do not have the standing of any Jewish prophet, ancient or modern. I am a Gentile writer in California who has spent a week trying to walk the middle road and who, on a Sunday morning at eleven o’clock, found that the thing he had been holding in for over a year would no longer stay in.

The longer thing I want to say is this. I love the Jewish people. I love the Jewish ethical tradition. I love the friends I have who are Jewish, and I love the writers and rabbis and philosophers whose work has shaped my own. I love the State of Israel as the only state in which the Jewish people have, since the destruction of the Second Temple, exercised political sovereignty over their own collective life. I love it the way I love the United States — as a state whose foundational commitments deserve to be honored and whose corrupt leaders deserve to be opposed. I love it enough to say what I am saying.

Netanyahu is a fascist. The coalition he leads is fascist. The American apparatus that protects him is doing damage to Jewish safety, to American constitutional order, and to the moral seriousness of the word antisemitism that American Jews depend on for their long-term security. The reckoning is coming. When it comes, it will require allies who refused to be silent in the years before it arrived.

I will not be silent. I am not silent this morning. I will not be silent next week or next year. I will not be silent because I love the Jewish people too much to be silent, and because the prophets who loved them most fiercely taught me that love without truth is no love at all.

It is for love of the Jews that I say these words.

That is all I came to say.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a book that the men who are dismantling the American republic have all read. There is a book that Peter Thiel has cited as the most important book of his life. There is a book that Curtis Yarvin treats as a foundational text. There is a book that Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State is a thirty-year sequel to. There is a book that David Sacks recommends in interviews and that the network-state seasteading post-American crypto-libertarian sovereign-jurisdiction wing of the technology class treats with the reverence that an earlier generation of conservatives reserved for The Road to Serfdom.

The book is The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, published in 1997.

The book is a blueprint. The blueprint has been executed step by step over the last twenty-nine years by men who treated it as scripture and who had the capital and the political access to put its program into effect. The blueprint argues, in its plainest form, that the nation-state is a transitional historical formation that is about to be made obsolete by encryption, by computational labor mobility, by the digital dissolution of the tax base, and by the inability of mass democracies to compete with the agility of small jurisdictions that the cognitive elite will design for themselves. The blueprint argues that the response of the cognitive elite to this transition must be the deliberate construction of exit options — new jurisdictions, alternative currencies, private security, opt-out citizenship — that will allow the elite to escape the predatory tax-and-regulation apparatus of the late-twentieth-century state before that apparatus collapses on top of them.

The blueprint argues, with chilling explicitness, that democracy is parasitic upon the productive class, that the mass of citizens will become useless, and that the future belongs to a sovereign individual who has shed the burdens of national membership in favor of a portfolio of jurisdictional arbitrage opportunities maintained by the deliberate weakening of the nation-states he was born inside of.

This is what the book says. The book is on Amazon. The book is on Audible. The book has been continuously in print since 1997. Peter Thiel wrote a foreword to the 2020 reissue. The foreword is worth reading. The foreword does not disavow the book’s central argument. The foreword amplifies it.

The piece I am writing this morning is an attempt to do for The Sovereign Individual what James Pogue did for the postliberal Right in Vanity Fair in 2022 and what Mara Hvistendahl did for the Singham network in The New York Times in 2023. The piece is an attempt to read the document the operators have been reading and to put what it actually says in front of the people they have been counting on not to read it. The document is the blueprint. The blueprint has been executed. The blueprint’s execution requires the dismantling of the American constitutional order, and the dismantling has been the project of the men who took the blueprint seriously and built their careers on its premises.

The financial instrument the blueprint required, before the blueprint could become operational, did not exist in 1997. The financial instrument is Bitcoin. The man who built Bitcoin has been hidden behind a pseudonym for seventeen years. The hiding ended, or began to end, on April 8 of this year, when John Carreyrou published in The New York Times the eighteen-month investigation that identified Adam Back, the British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream, as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Back has denied the identification. The denial is on the record. The evidence Carreyrou laid out is also on the record. It is the most thorough public investigation into the Nakamoto question ever published. It deserves to be read. And what it identifies, beneath the technical question of who wrote a particular white paper in 2008, is the structural question that this piece is concerned with. The structural question is this: the most influential libertarian manifesto of the late twentieth century called for the construction of an exit currency, and an exit currency was built, and the man who probably built it is, this very year, the chief executive officer of a Bitcoin-treasury firm going public through a reverse merger with a blank-check company controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm previously led by the current United States Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick.

The cypherpunk libertarian dream of 1997 and the petro-AI rentier coalition in the Cabinet of 2026 are joined, in a single transaction, on a single corporate filing, by a single man.

This is the piece.

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I want to begin with what The Sovereign Individual actually says, because the people who have not read it imagine it is a more reasonable book than it is.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg argued that human history could be divided into stages defined by the dominant productive technology and the political form best suited to that technology. The agrarian age produced the kingdom and the church. The industrial age produced the nation-state and the mass democracy. The information age, which the authors dated as beginning around 1990, would produce, they argued, the sovereign individual — a person liberated by digital technology from the territorial constraints that had made the nation-state his necessary host.

The mechanism of liberation was specific. Encryption, the authors argued, would make it impossible for governments to monitor private financial transactions. Digital labor mobility would allow knowledge workers to physically locate in low-tax jurisdictions while serving global clients. Alternative currencies, free from the seignorage of national central banks, would emerge to handle the transactional volume of a stateless cognitive elite. The combination of these forces would make the existing high-tax welfare states of the late twentieth century financially unviable. The high-tax states would, in the authors’ projection, respond either by becoming more predatory in their efforts to extract revenue from their dwindling captive populations, or by collapsing entirely.

In either case, the sovereign individual would be free. He would be free, in the authors’ phrasing, because he would have exited. He would have moved his capital into encrypted instruments the state could not seize. He would have moved his residence to a jurisdiction the state could not tax. He would have purchased private security, private adjudication, private education, private health insurance, and private community membership, all from competing providers, none of them dependent on the failing nation-state in which he had had the misfortune to be born. He would have become, in the strict sense of the term, post-national.

The book treated this transition as both inevitable and desirable. The book also treated, with extraordinary explicitness, the question of what would happen to the people left behind.

The people left behind would, in Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s accounting, be useless. They would be useless because the productive value of their labor would have been displaced by automation and by the offshoring of intellectual work to cheaper jurisdictions. They would have no political power because the cognitive elite would have exited the democracy that had previously made their numerical majority dangerous to capital. They would be governed by what Davidson and Rees-Mogg, with a candor that has not aged well, described as a cognitariat of administrators whose role would be the management, increasingly punitive, of a population that had become surplus to the productive economy.

The book is explicit that mass democracy is a transitional form that the cognitive elite must abandon in order to flourish. The book is explicit that the welfare state is a predatory institution that takes from the productive in order to maintain the unproductive. The book is explicit that the right historical analogy for the cognitive elite of the twenty-first century is the Renaissance Italian merchant class that built city-states outside the feudal order — and that the appropriate political form for this elite is something like the condottiere city-republic of fifteenth-century Florence, a hierarchical mercantile aristocracy that arms itself, taxes itself lightly, and treats the surrounding peasantry as a population whose labor can be purchased without whose political claims need not be honored.

This is the book. This is the program. I am not editorializing. I am summarizing fairly. Read it. Davidson and Rees-Mogg said what they meant.

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I want to dwell, for a moment, on the question of why a book this openly anti-democratic became scripture for the most powerful men in Silicon Valley.

Peter Thiel discovered The Sovereign Individual in his twenties and has, by his own repeated testimony, regarded it as the single most important book of his life. The book is the explicit philosophical background of every project Thiel has launched. PayPal was an attempt to build the encrypted exit currency Davidson and Rees-Mogg had called for. Palantir was an attempt to capture, on behalf of the sovereign-individual class, the surveillance infrastructure that the dying nation-state would inevitably build against its own population. Founders Fund was structured as a vehicle to capitalize the technological transition the book predicted. Thiel’s funding of the Seasteading Institute in 2008 was a literal attempt to construct the off-shore floating jurisdictions the book had projected. Thiel’s investment in Yarvin’s company Tlon, his support for the neoreactionary intellectual project, his funding of the National Conservative movement, his eight-figure spend on the Vance Senate campaign — all of it is downstream of The Sovereign Individual. All of it is the construction of the exit infrastructure the book required.

Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, published in 2022, is the operational manual for the post-Davidson generation. Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, argues that the next political form is the network state — a digitally constituted community that owns property collectively in a single jurisdiction or in a network of jurisdictions, that issues its own currency, that operates its own internal legal system, and that negotiates with existing nation-states from a position of capital-backed leverage. The network state, in Srinivasan’s framing, is the operational realization of the sovereign-individual exit. Davidson and Rees-Mogg had projected that the cognitive elite would exit as individuals. Srinivasan has updated the projection: the cognitive elite will exit collectively, in coordinated formations large enough to negotiate sovereignty rather than simply purchase residency.

The network-state projects already exist. Próspera in Honduras, on the island of Roatán, is a charter city operating under a special economic zone agreement that grants it substantial regulatory autonomy from the Honduran state. It was funded in part by Pronomos Capital, which has Thiel-network investors. It markets itself, openly, as a Davidson-and-Rees-Mogg jurisdiction. The Bitcoin city projects in El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele’s government has accepted Bitcoin as legal tender and has marketed the country as a destination for sovereign-individual exiles, are another implementation. Adam Back lives in El Salvador. He moved there in 2022. He runs Blockstream from there. He is, as Carreyrou’s investigation makes clear, embedded in the Bukele-era infrastructure of the country in ways that would be of significant interest to the Securities and Exchange Commission if his identification as Nakamoto were ever formally established.

The point is not that any one of these projects is, in itself, decisive. The point is that the projects exist. The point is that the sovereign-individual blueprint has been actively implemented for almost three decades by men with the capital and the political access to implement it. The point is that the blueprint required, for its full operationalization, a financial instrument that would allow the cognitive elite to hold wealth outside the reach of state taxation and seizure. The blueprint required Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was published as a white paper on October 31, 2008. Bitcoin was launched as a working network on January 3, 2009. Bitcoin has, in the seventeen years since, become a one-and-a-half-trillion-dollar asset class. Bitcoin is held, in significant concentrations, by exactly the wing of the technology class that has built its careers on the sovereign-individual blueprint. Bitcoin is the exit currency the blueprint called for. Bitcoin is the thing that, in 1997, had to be invented in order to make the rest of the program operational. Bitcoin was invented. It works. It is here.

The question of who invented it is the question Carreyrou spent eighteen months of his life answering.

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John Carreyrou is, for those who do not know his work, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who broke the Theranos story in 2015. His book Bad Blood is the definitive account of how Elizabeth Holmes built a fifteen-billion-dollar fraud on a blood-testing technology that did not work. Carreyrou’s reputation is as careful and as documented as any investigative reporter alive. When he spent eighteen months on a question, the question is worth taking seriously.

The investigation, published in The New York Times on April 8, 2026, identified Adam Back, the British cryptographer and CEO of Blockstream, as the most probable candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. The investigation’s methodology was the systematic stylometric and behavioral analysis of decades of cryptography-forum archives, cross-referenced against the corpus of Satoshi’s known writings. Carreyrou and his AI-analysis collaborator Dylan Freedman began with a list of approximately twenty thousand cryptography-forum posters from the relevant period. They filtered for British spelling conventions, reducing the list to four hundred and thirty-four candidates. They filtered for its/it’s misuse patterns that matched Satoshi’s, reducing the list to one hundred and fourteen. They filtered for the use of also in sentence-ending positions, reducing the list to fifty-six. They filtered for specific hyphenation idiosyncrasies — hyphenating noun-based and file-sharing while failing to hyphenate double spending — and arrived at a list of twenty. They filtered for further specific spelling alternations that matched Satoshi’s known patterns. They arrived at one name.

The name was Adam Back.

Carreyrou’s investigation also documented the structural facts that, independently of the stylometric case, made Back the obvious candidate from the beginning. Back’s 1997 Hashcash paper is foundational to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism. Back was one of the first two people Satoshi emailed before publishing the Bitcoin white paper, specifically to ensure correct citation of the Hashcash work. Back is the only person named in the body of the Bitcoin white paper itself. Back was largely absent from the cryptography forums during the period when Satoshi was most active. Back returned to those forums shortly after Satoshi’s final 2011 disappearance. Back has, in interviews and at conferences, repeatedly produced behavioral tells — visible discomfort, blushing, fidgeting, verbal slips — when asked directly about the Satoshi question. Cullen Hoback’s 2024 HBO documentary Money Electric had already centered Back as the most likely candidate on a different set of evidence.

Carreyrou’s conclusion is that the combined evidence is, in his phrase, overwhelming. Back’s response, on X, was that the evidence was a blend of chance and common phrases used by individuals with similar backgrounds and interests. Back also said, in a separate post: We are all Satoshi.

That last sentence is worth holding for a moment. We are all Satoshi. It is the cypherpunk equivalent of I am Spartacus — the gesture of collective identification with a figure the state would otherwise like to single out. It is also, structurally, an admission that the question of who Satoshi is, in 2026, matters in ways it did not matter in 2012. It matters because Satoshi, if Back, holds an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoin, currently valued at approximately one hundred billion dollars at present prices. It matters because the United States Securities and Exchange Commission would require disclosure of a stake that size from any officer of a publicly traded entity. It matters because Back is, this year, taking BSTR, a Bitcoin treasury firm holding over thirty thousand Bitcoin, public through a reverse merger with a blank-check company controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald.

Cantor Fitzgerald was previously led by Howard Lutnick. Howard Lutnick is the current United States Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick, before joining the Trump cabinet, made Cantor Fitzgerald one of the principal institutional pipelines for Bitcoin into the legacy financial system. Lutnick has been, by his own public statements, a Bitcoin holder and advocate for years. The Trump administration has appointed crypto-friendly officials to every regulatory position that touches the industry. The administration has dismantled or suspended the SEC enforcement actions that the Biden administration had brought against major crypto firms. The administration has accepted Bitcoin contributions to its political operation. The administration has, in March of this year, established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at the Treasury, the policy proposal pushed for years by exactly the sovereign-individual wing of the tech class that built its careers on the Davidson-and-Rees-Mogg blueprint.

The blueprint required an exit currency. The exit currency was built, almost certainly, by Adam Back. The exit currency has been integrated into the legacy financial system by Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald. The integration is being formalized, this year, through a public-listing transaction that puts the suspected creator of the exit currency on the board of an entity whose investment-banking sponsor is the firm of the sitting Commerce Secretary. The federal regulatory apparatus that would otherwise be the principal obstacle to this transaction has been staffed by appointees who are themselves believers in the sovereign-individual program.

This is the closure of the loop. The libertarian fantasy of 1997 is the policy of the United States government in 2026. The cypherpunks have, by way of an instrument they built and a political coalition they funded, taken the executive branch of the country whose constitutional order their philosophical text identified as a transitional formation to be exited.

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I want to be careful here, because the specific identification of Back as Nakamoto is contested and Back has denied it. The piece I am writing does not depend on the identification being definitively true. The piece depends on the structural facts that are true regardless.

It is true that The Sovereign Individual was published in 1997. It is true that Peter Thiel has cited it as foundational. It is true that the book argues for the obsolescence of mass democracy and for the construction of exit infrastructure by the cognitive elite. It is true that Bitcoin was launched in 2009 and provides exactly the financial instrument the book called for. It is true that the network-state and seasteading projects descend, in straight intellectual genealogy, from the book’s program. It is true that the Trump administration’s cabinet contains, in Lutnick at Commerce and in David Sacks as AI and Crypto Czar and in Elon Musk’s recently departed but enormously influential DOGE operation, exactly the sovereign-individual wing of the tech class the book addressed. It is true that the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the dismantlement of crypto regulatory enforcement are policy realizations of the book’s program. It is true that the integration of Bitcoin into the legacy financial system through firms like Cantor Fitzgerald is the formalization of the exit-currency function the book required.

These facts do not depend on Carreyrou’s identification of Back. They are the structural reality regardless of who, specifically, built the instrument. The instrument exists, the program exists, the political coalition exists, the cabinet exists. The piece is about that. The Carreyrou investigation is one extraordinary documentary anchor in the larger picture, and if Carreyrou is right, the picture acquires a name at its center that closes the loop with extraordinary symmetry. But the picture is the picture either way.

The picture is this. A book published in 1997 outlined a program for the dismantling of mass democracy and the construction of exit infrastructure for a cognitive elite. The program required an exit currency. The currency was built. The political coalition required to push the program into government was assembled. The coalition has been funded, over the last fifteen years, by exactly the same petro-AI rentier nexus I have documented through the pieces of the last week. The Saudi PIF stake in xAI, the Qatar stake in Anthropic, the UAE’s MGX stake in OpenAI, the Microsoft stake in G42 — these are the same money flows that are funding the postliberal political project Pogue documented. The same donors who underwrite Vance and Yarvin and Deneen also underwrite the network-state projects and the Bitcoin infrastructure firms. The program is one program. It has been executed by one coalition. It is now in the executive branch.

The Sovereign Individual was the blueprint. We are watching the blueprint be built.

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I want to close by saying what this piece is for.

The pieces of the last week have established the historical structure (the antebellum cornerstone), the contemporary intellectual project (the postliberal turn that Pogue documented), the financial architecture (the petro-AI rentier coalition), the cover stories on both flanks (the postliberal conspiracy theory ecology on one side and the campist apologetics on the other), and the middle road that refuses both flanks in the name of the third American founding.

This piece adds the missing economic and technological layer. The piece adds the answer to the question: how did the cognitive elite of Silicon Valley, which in 1997 was a milieu of libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs largely indifferent to mainstream politics, become, by 2025, the political coalition that has captured the executive branch and is implementing a constitutional displacement project? The answer is that the cognitive elite of Silicon Valley took a specific book seriously. They organized their lives around it. They built the technologies the book required. They funded the political project the book implied. They are now executing the program in government.

The book is not hidden. The book is on Amazon. The book has been continuously in print for twenty-nine years. The men who treat it as scripture have, in public, said so. Peter Thiel said so. David Sacks said so. The pattern of his foundation grants and the pattern of his political donations confirm the claim he has made in public. Balaji Srinivasan wrote a thirty-year sequel. Curtis Yarvin treats the book as the intellectual background against which his own neo-reactionary work makes sense.

The middle road’s labor, when confronted with the existence of a published blueprint that has been executed in public over three decades, is to read the blueprint. To recognize what has been built. To stop being surprised when the next step of the blueprint is implemented. To stop offering, as commentary, the bewildered observation that the political coalition has gone too far or has abandoned conservatism or has embraced authoritarianism. The coalition has not abandoned anything. The coalition has executed the program it inherited from a book published in 1997. The program is exactly what it has always been. The program is the dismantling of mass democracy on behalf of a cognitive elite that has decided it no longer wishes to be governed by the votes of the population whose labor produced the wealth that financed the technology that made the elite cognitive in the first place.

The exit currency was Bitcoin. The exit jurisdictions are Próspera and Bitcoin City and the seasteading ventures and the special economic zones being negotiated, this year, in half a dozen countries on the Thiel network’s quiet diplomatic itinerary. The exit governance was supposed to be the network state. The legacy nation-state — the United States of America, in particular, with its constitutional order, its Reconstruction Amendments, its Civil Rights Acts, its three-branch separation of powers, its independent judiciary, its free press, its public schools, its Social Security and Medicare, its hundred and sixty years of slowly perfected union — was supposed to be exited, then weakened, then captured, then dismantled.

The capture has happened. The dismantling is in progress.

The middle road’s response, in 2026, is not bewildered commentary. The middle road’s response is the recognition that the blueprint has been published, that the blueprint has been executed, that the blueprint is being completed, and that the labor of the third American founding requires the destruction of the blueprint as a viable political project.

The destruction begins with reading the document. The destruction continues with naming the men who have built their careers on it. The destruction continues with refusing the cover stories — the libertarian rhetoric of innovation and freedom and exit, the postliberal rhetoric of community and tradition and common good, the campist rhetoric of multipolarity and resistance and anti-imperialism, every register of the same operation translated for every audience the operation needs to neutralize. The destruction continues with the slow patient citizen labor of the kind I described in Towards a More Perfect Union — voting in every election, donating to every candidate and every publication and every institution that has not yet been captured, witnessing the documents, refusing the cover stories, walking the middle road past the flanks toward the union the Preamble named.

The book is on Amazon. Read it. Then look at the cabinet of the United States government. Then look at the policy proposals coming out of the White House on Bitcoin, on AI, on the network-state-adjacent special economic zones being negotiated in Honduras and El Salvador and across the Sahel. Then look at the donor list of the political coalition that put the cabinet in place. Then look at the symmetry between the donor list and the cap table of the major AI firms, and between that cap table and the sovereign wealth funds of the petro-states.

The blueprint is the blueprint. The execution is the execution. The man at the center, whether Adam Back or someone else, holds the keys to a hundred billion dollars of the instrument the blueprint required. The transaction this year that takes the suspected creator of the instrument public through the firm of the sitting Commerce Secretary is the formal joining of the technological wing of the operation to the political wing.

It is one operation. It has always been one operation. The middle road’s first labor is to see that it is one operation.

The cornerstone we are defending is the cornerstone of the republic — the proposition Jefferson laid imperfectly, Lincoln re-laid in the Second Inaugural, the Reconstruction Amendments tried to make permanent, the civil rights generation died for, and Magnifica Humanitas names again in our own day.

The cornerstone they are laying is the cornerstone Stephens named in Savannah in 1861 — translated, this time, into the vocabulary of cryptography, special economic zones, network states, and a Bitcoin treasury whose CEO will not say whether he created the instrument that makes the whole thing possible.

⁂

I wonder what my old friend Jack Dorsey thinks about all of this.

Somebody should ask him.

Go Deeper into the Circus

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There is a difficulty of vocabulary I want to confront at the beginning, because the word I am about to use has been so degraded by misuse that the people who most need to hear it will reach for the back button before the sentence finishes.

The word is fascist. The proposition is this. The American antebellum South was a fully developed fascist civilization. Not a civilization with fascist features. Not a slave society that resembled fascism in some respects. A fascism. The structural and ideological architecture that Europe would name and recognize in the 1920s and 1930s — the racial hierarchy enforced by law and by paramilitary terror, the cult of martial honor, the fusion of aristocratic landed wealth with a controlled press and a co-opted clergy, the political theory that explicitly rejected the proposition that all men are created equal, the educational system that produced ideological cadres trained from boyhood in the defense of the order — all of it existed in the slaveholding South seventy to a hundred years before Italians and Germans gave the form its name.

The Confederacy was the moment the fascist state inside the republic tried to secede from the republic and become a sovereign fascist state outside it. The republic won the war. The republic did not destroy the structure. The structure went into the basement and waited.

It has been waiting there for a hundred and sixty years. The people Pogue documented are the people who have come down the basement stairs to bring it back up. The intellectual project they have been building — Yarvin’s, Vance’s, Deneen’s, the Claremont apparatus’s, the postliberal turn in general — is not a new project. It is the same project Calhoun and Fitzhugh and Stephens were building in the 1840s and 1850s under a different costume. It is the same project Carlyle was theorizing in London while corresponding with the planters of South Carolina. It is the same project that, when defeated in 1865, retreated into Jim Crow and waited for the next opportunity. The opportunity has come. The basement door is open. The men coming up the stairs are wearing different clothes, but the project in their hands is the same project.

This is the missing piece of the diagnosis. The piece on the war on terror named the operators who walked Bush into the wrong war. The piece on the anti-imperialism of fools named the campist apologists for the rival empires. The piece on the cover stories named Pogue’s documentation of the postliberal turn. Towards a More Perfect Union named the middle road that refuses both flanks. But none of those pieces have told you what the right flank actually is, in its deepest historical register. The right flank is older than Mussolini. The right flank is American. The right flank has been here from the beginning, and the war we have not yet finished is the war the Reconstruction did not finish.

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On March 21, 1861, three weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter, the Vice President of the newly seceded Confederate States of America, Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia, delivered a speech in Savannah that has come to be called the Cornerstone Speech. The full text is available on the website of the American Battlefield Trust. The full text is available on the website of Teaching American History. The full text has been available on the open internet for as long as the open internet has existed. Anyone can read it. Almost nobody does.

In that speech Stephens explained, with extraordinary clarity, the founding principle of the new Confederate government. He acknowledged that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders of the original Republic had believed that all men were created equal, that the institution of slavery was wrong in principle, and that it would in time pass away. This was an error, Stephens said. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the storm came and the wind blew. And then the cornerstone:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

I want to read that sentence the way it deserves to be read. The Vice President of the Confederate States of America, in 1861, declared from a public platform in his own voice that the Confederacy was the first government in the history of the world founded explicitly on the proposition of racial inequality. The first. He was right that it was a first. He was right that this was its cornerstone. He was right that the old Republic had been founded on the opposite proposition, and that the new Confederacy was its repudiation.

This is not a matter of inference. This is not the interpretive labor of contemporary historians reading subtext into the past. This is what the Vice President of the Confederate States said, in his own voice, three weeks before the war began. He told us what they were. He told us what they were founding. He told us what the cornerstone was.

A government founded on racial hierarchy, enforced by law, defended by martial honor, sanctified by Scripture, theorized by a coherent intellectual class, and propagated through a controlled press and a captured educational system. The word for this kind of government is fascism. The word did not exist in 1861. The form did. The form preceded the name by sixty years.

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The intellectual class of the slaveholding South had been preparing this position for thirty years before Stephens spoke it from the platform in Savannah.

John C. Calhoun, the Senator from South Carolina who served as Vice President under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, spent the last decade of his life writing the two political treatises that became the philosophical spine of the secessionist project. A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, both published posthumously in 1851, argued for what Calhoun called the concurrent majority — a doctrine by which any sufficiently powerful minority interest within the Republic possessed the right to veto the actions of the numerical majority. The doctrine was, in form, an argument for federalism. In substance, it was an argument for the perpetual capacity of the slaveholding class to override the will of the free states whenever the free states attempted to constrain slavery.

But Calhoun went further. Calhoun argued, in lectures and speeches that survive, that the proposition of the Declaration of Independence — all men are created equal — was a fundamental falsehood, a piece of sentimental Enlightenment rhetoric that no serious political philosophy could accept. He argued that human beings were created unequal in capacity, in temperament, and in moral nature; that society was naturally hierarchical; that the attempt to organize a republic around the fiction of equality would produce either chaos or tyranny; and that the slaveholding South had achieved a more humane and rational order than the free-labor North precisely because it had organized itself around the truth of inequality rather than the lie of equality.

The argument is not a sideshow of antebellum political theory. The argument is antebellum political theory in its mature form. The argument was taught in Southern academies, preached from Southern pulpits, published in Southern journals, debated in Southern legislatures, and elaborated, with greater and greater intellectual sophistication, in the decade leading up to the war. The argument’s logical conclusion was the Cornerstone Speech. Stephens did not invent the position. Stephens stated, in the most condensed form, the position the Southern intellectual class had been building for a generation.

The second pillar of that intellectual class was George Fitzhugh, the Virginia planter and lawyer whose two books Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857) constituted the most ambitious philosophical defense of slavery ever published in English. Fitzhugh’s argument was not the apologetic argument of the moderate slaveholder who wished the institution were milder. Fitzhugh’s argument was that slavery was not a regrettable exception to be reformed but a positive good to be extended. He argued that the free-labor system of the North was white slavery without the protections of black slavery — that the Northern factory worker was more oppressed, more exploited, and more abandoned than the Southern slave because the Southern slave at least had a master who was obligated to provide for him in old age and sickness while the Northern factory worker, when his labor was used up, was simply discarded. Fitzhugh proposed, in all seriousness, that the proper future of human society was the extension of the slave system to white workers, North and South — that the masters would protect the workers, the workers would labor for the masters, and the chaos of free competition would be replaced by the order of organic hierarchy.

I am summarizing his argument fairly. The text is available, in full, on the Documenting the American South project at the University of North Carolina. Read him. Cannibals all, he called the Northern capitalist class — devouring their workers without acknowledging that they were devouring them, because the form of the devouring was wage labor rather than chattel ownership. We conclude that about nineteen out of every twenty individuals have a natural and inalienable right to be taken care of and protected; to have guardians, trustees, husbands, or masters; in other words, they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves.

Fitzhugh’s argument was the most thoroughly worked-out anti-Enlightenment political philosophy in nineteenth-century America. It rejected the Declaration. It rejected the principle of consent. It rejected the proposition that government derived its legitimacy from the governed. It proposed, in its place, a society of fixed hierarchies in which the masters were responsible for the welfare of the slaves and the slaves owed obedience to the masters and the entire arrangement was sanctioned by Scripture and protected by law.

This is the cornerstone. This is what the Confederacy was founding. The Confederacy was not a movement of disaffected farmers who wanted to keep their property. The Confederacy was a political project with a philosophical program, an intellectual class, a press, a clergy, a military culture, and an explicit declaration that it was founding a new kind of state on the principle of human inequality.

The word for this kind of state is fascism.

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I want to walk through the structural parallels with twentieth-century European fascism specifically, because the claim the antebellum South was fascist is not rhetorical. It is structural. Every major component of the form that Mussolini named and Hitler radicalized was present in the slaveholding South seventy to ninety years earlier.

A racial hierarchy enforced by law. The slave codes of every Southern state defined a category of human beings as property and another category as full persons, with a third category of free Black persons subject to extensive legal restrictions that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws by a century. The hierarchy was not customary. It was statutory. It was enforced by courts. It was administered by sheriffs.

A paramilitary apparatus operating with the sanction of the state. The slave patrols, established by colonial-era law in every Southern colony, were the world’s first organized racialized paramilitary policing force. White men were required, by law, to serve in them. They were authorized to stop, search, whip, and arrest any Black person they encountered without warrant. After 1865 they reorganized as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues and the Red Shirts and, in the early twentieth century, the Citizens Councils. The paramilitary form was continuous. The European fascist movements would, in the 1920s, develop their own paramilitary formations — the Squadristi, the Sturmabteilung, the Arrow Cross — and they would do, in their own countries, what the slave patrols and the Klan had done in the American South. The Klan was, in its 1915 reincarnation, openly admired by the Italian Fascists and by the early Nazis as the model of a racial paramilitary that had successfully restored hierarchy after a period of political dissolution.

A cult of martial honor concentrated in an aristocratic male class. The dueling culture of the antebellum South was an institution of ritualized violence designed to enforce the social discipline of the planter class and to mark the boundary between gentlemen and others. The military academies of the South — the Citadel in Charleston, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington — were designed to produce a hereditary officer corps trained in the martial defense of the slave order. The European fascists would later produce their own cults of martial honor and their own academies for the production of ideological officers. The form was the same. The content was the same. The function was the same.

A fusion of landed aristocratic capital with industrial and commercial capital, organized under the direction of a coherent political program. The cotton economy of the antebellum South was the most globalized agricultural commodity economy in human history to that point. The planter class was not isolated from world capitalism; it was central to it. British Lancashire’s textile mills, French port cities, and New York’s commodity exchanges were all bound into the cotton economy by deep capital flows. The planter class fused, through these flows, with Northern banking and shipping interests, and the alliance kept the slave system politically protected for sixty years against the moral pressure of the abolition movement. The European fascists would, in the 1930s, build alliances between landed aristocratic capital, industrial capital, and finance capital, organized under the direction of the party. The American slaveholders had built the prototype.

A controlled press in which dissenting material was criminal contraband. By the 1830s every Southern state had passed laws making it a felony to circulate abolitionist material. Postmasters in the South were authorized to seize and destroy anti-slavery newspapers and pamphlets. Newspaper editors who criticized slavery were run out of town by mobs. The Republic of free speech that the First Amendment had purported to establish stopped at the Mason-Dixon Line. The European fascists would, in the twentieth century, establish state control over the press, prohibit dissenting publications, and use mob violence to enforce ideological discipline. The slaveholding South had institutionalized these practices a hundred years earlier.

A captured religious establishment that provided theological cover for the order. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 specifically in the schism over slavery, when the Southern Baptists broke from their Northern brethren over the latter’s refusal to ordain slaveholders as missionaries. The Methodist Episcopal Church South split the same way in 1844. The Presbyterians split in 1861. The major Protestant denominations of the South reorganized themselves around the defense of slavery as a Scripturally sanctioned institution, produced extensive theological literature defending the position, and trained generations of clergy in the doctrine. The European fascists would seek and largely receive, through the Reichskonkordat and the Lateran Treaty, the cooperation of the established churches in their countries. The slaveholding South had built its own captured church, from within, decades earlier.

An educational system designed to produce ideological cadres. The young men of the planter class were educated, from primary school through college, in a curriculum designed to produce defenders of the slave order. The classics were taught in a register that emphasized aristocracy and hierarchy. The Bible was taught in a register that emphasized the Curse of Ham and the patriarchal household. Political theory was taught from Calhoun and Fitzhugh and their successors. The graduates of these institutions provided the officers, the lawyers, the legislators, the journalists, and the clergy of the slaveholding civilization. The European fascists would later build their own cadre-production systems in the youth movements, the Hitlerjugend, the GIL. The slaveholding South had run its own version for a hundred and fifty years.

I could go on. The list goes on. The structural parallels are exhaustive, and the point of cataloguing them is not to score rhetorical points. The point is to establish that what I am calling a fascism older than fascism is not a metaphor. It is a structural identification. The thing the Europeans named in the 1920s already existed, in mature form, in the American South of the 1850s. The Europeans did not invent fascism. The Europeans imported a form that had been pioneered, refined, and operated for two centuries on the other side of the Atlantic.

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The war defeated the fascist state. The war did not destroy the fascist civilization.

Reconstruction tried. From 1865 to 1877, the federal government attempted, through the Reconstruction Amendments, through the Freedman’s Bureau, through military occupation, through the seating of Black legislators in Southern statehouses, to dismantle the structure that had produced the Confederacy and to replace it with a multiracial constitutional order. The attempt was real. The achievements were real. Black Americans were elected to office at every level, from local school boards to the United States Senate. Public schools were established. Land redistribution was attempted, in places, before being blocked by Andrew Johnson’s pardons of Confederate landowners. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed. For twelve years, the constitutional order tried to do what the war had not finished.

The Compromise of 1877 ended it. In exchange for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes being awarded the disputed presidency, the federal troops were withdrawn from the South. The Klan and the White Leagues, who had been operating clandestinely against Reconstruction for a decade, moved into the open. The Redeemers — the political coalition of the restored planter class and the rising Southern Democratic Party — took control of every Southern state legislature within a few years. Black voters were systematically disenfranchised through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and mob terror. The convict-lease system reestablished slavery in all but name. Lynching became a public ritual of racial discipline performed in front of crowds of thousands, with postcards, and photographs in newspapers. Jim Crow law was codified through the 1890s. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 gave the Supreme Court’s blessing to the new order.

The fascist state-within-a-state had been reconstituted. It was no longer formally a separate sovereignty. It did not need to be. It controlled its territory through state legislatures and through paramilitary terror, it operated its press and its pulpit and its educational system in continuity with the antebellum order, and it had successfully bought, through the Compromise of 1877 and the long retreat of Northern Republican will, the acquiescence of the federal government. Jim Crow ran for ninety years, from the late 1870s to the mid-1960s. The civil rights movement broke its legal apparatus. The civil rights movement did not break the underlying structure.

The underlying structure went, again, into the basement.

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The basement door has been opening, slowly, for fifty years.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 was the first opening. The Republican Party, which had been the party of Lincoln and emancipation for a century, was deliberately retooled by Kevin Phillips and the Nixon campaign to absorb the white-supremacist Democratic vote of the former Confederacy. The strategy worked. The South flipped. The voters who had been the political base of Jim Crow became the political base of the Republican Party, and the party that had freed the slaves became, over the next forty years, the party of the white grievance that had never reconciled itself to their freedom.

Reagan’s Philadelphia, Mississippi, speech in 1980, delivered at the Neshoba County Fair seven miles from where the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered by the Klan in 1964, signaled to the white South that the Republican Party understood whose grievance it was now collecting. As I established in The 1953 Coup Never Ended, Reagan himself was not the architect of this — the architects were the operators around him, the same intellectual class that has been waiting in the drawer for the moment when the project could be restarted. But the speech was given. The signal was sent. The voters who needed to hear it heard it.

The Reagan Revolution was not, in its first register, a restoration of the fascist state-within-a-state. It was a coalition that included a sincere Cold War anticommunism, a sincere economic libertarianism, and a captured religious right that had been organized by men like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell. The fascist current was present in the coalition but was not its dominant voice. The operators understood that the coalition could not yet absorb the explicit return of the antebellum project.

The Trump rupture in 2016 changed the equation. Trump did what no Republican president had been willing to do since the Compromise of 1877 — he openly courted, and openly accepted the support of, the explicit white-nationalist movement. Charlottesville in August 2017 was the test. Trump’s very fine people on both sides was the answer. The fascists were back in the coalition openly. The fascists were back in the public square. The fascists were back in the language of the President of the United States.

What Pogue documented in 2022 was the intellectual return that completed the political return. Trump in 2016 was a vibe. Trump in 2024 was a vibe with an apparatus. The apparatus is the postliberal project. The apparatus is Vance and Yarvin and Deneen and Anton and Eastman and Claremont and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the network of journals and podcasts and Substacks that have, in the years since Pogue’s piece, become the operational center of an American postliberal political theory.

The postliberal political theory is the political theory of the antebellum South in modern dress.

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I am going to do the work explicitly. The line is unbroken and the documents are available.

Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug from 2007 to roughly 2014 and under his own name since, has produced over a million words arguing for the abolition of the American constitutional order and its replacement by a kind of neo-monarchical authority that he variously describes as a CEO, a Stuart Restoration, a receivership, or, in the formulation he used to James Pogue and that I quoted in The Conspiracy Is the Cover Story, a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator. The central intellectual influence on Yarvin’s project, by his own extensive testimony, is Thomas Carlyle. Yarvin has written a multi-part essay called Moldbug on Carlyle that runs to tens of thousands of words and constitutes the most sustained recovery of Carlyle as a political thinker in contemporary American letters.

Yarvin’s Carlyle is the Carlyle of Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (1849), the pamphlet in which Carlyle defended slavery as a natural human relationship, argued that the freed Black population of the West Indies was suffering from too much freedom rather than too little, and proposed that the proper organization of human society placed those suited by nature for mastery over those suited by nature for slavery. Yarvin, in his essay, treats this argument sympathetically. He writes, as quoted in Public Books in March 2025, that Carlyle was one of the few theoretical defenders of slavery in the last two centuries, that Carlyle’s view of slavery as a natural human relationship, like marriage deserves to be understood on its own terms, and that Carlyle’s argument that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery is a serious position that contemporary thinkers should engage rather than dismiss.

I am not editorializing. I am quoting. The man whose intellectual project has become the philosophical engine of the postliberal turn — the man whose ideas Peter Thiel has been promoting in interviews since 2021, the man whose Cathedral concept Vance used on the Pogue tour, the man invited to speak at the inaugural-week parties in January 2025 — has spent the last fifteen years producing a sustained intellectual recovery of the nineteenth-century pro-slavery position. He has done it under a pseudonym for most of those years, but he has done it. The texts are on his Substack. The texts are searchable. The texts are quoted by his contemporary intellectual peers.

Carlyle, in his correspondence with the antebellum South, was the European thinker most admired by Calhoun and Fitzhugh. Carlyle corresponded with Southern intellectuals throughout the 1850s and openly approved of the slaveholding civilization. The line from Carlyle to the slaveholders runs through the Atlantic. The line from Carlyle to Yarvin runs through Yarvin’s own self-described intellectual genealogy. The line is therefore: slaveholders ↔ Carlyle → Yarvin → Thiel → Vance → contemporary postliberal political class.

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023) are the academically respectable face of the same project. Deneen argues, in the polite vocabulary of a Notre Dame professor of political theory, that the liberal order has destroyed the organic communities that gave human life meaning, that the only solution is a kind of aristopopulism in which a new elite governs in the name of, but with overriding authority over, the masses. This is Fitzhugh in academic dress. Fitzhugh argued that the laboring masses were better off under the guardianship of a paternal elite than under the chaos of free labor. Deneen argues that the contemporary masses are better off under the guardianship of a new aristopopulist elite than under the chaos of liberal individualism. The vocabulary has been laundered. The argument is the same.

J. D. Vance, in the Pogue interview and in the years since, has put the project into the language of Appalachian populist masculinity. The complaint about fucking McKinsey, the celebration of his son’s masculinity over consultant credentialism, the longing for a world in which fixed roles produce meaning — these are not original to Vance. These are the slaveholders’ complaint about the Northern commercial class, dressed in the costume of the 2020s. Cannibals all, Fitzhugh had said, of the Northern industrialists. Fucking McKinsey, Vance now says, of the same class’s contemporary descendants. The continuity is exact.

Anton’s Flight 93 Essay of 2016, with its proposition that the American constitutional order had become so degenerate that the choice in 2016 was between charging the cockpit or dying, is the contemporary form of the secessionist argument of 1860. The argument that the existing constitutional order is so corrupted by the equality fiction that it cannot be reformed and must be overthrown by direct action — this argument was Calhoun’s argument. Anton has updated the vocabulary.

The Claremont Institute, where Anton works, where Eastman worked, where John Yoo works, where Hillsdale College’s intellectual current flows, is the contemporary equivalent of the antebellum Southern academies. It is the institutional production site for the cadres of the postliberal project. It graduates lawyers and political theorists and policy entrepreneurs who go into the Trump administrations and into the conservative legal movement and into the new media ecosystem, all of them having been trained, in the Claremont curriculum, that the American Founding was originally good but has been corrupted by the modern equality regime, and that the project of the next generation is to restore the original meaning of the Constitution by undoing the Reconstruction Amendments’ egalitarian implications.

The intellectual class of the postliberal right is the intellectual class of the slaveholding South restarted under new sponsorship. The funding has changed. The slaveholders funded their intellectual class through cotton; the postliberals are funded through the Thiel apparatus, the DeVos family, the Mercer family, the Uihlein family, the Wilks family, and the new petro-AI rentier coalition I have been describing through these pieces. The intellectual content has not changed. The intellectual content is hierarchy, the rejection of equality, the captured church, the captured academy, the paramilitary preparedness, the controlled information environment, the cadre production system, and the patient long-term construction of an alternative governing apparatus that can be activated when the moment comes.

The moment, in this generation, has come.

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The moment is not new. The structure has been waiting in the basement since 1877. The structure was almost destroyed by the war and partially destroyed by the Reconstruction and decisively delegitimized by the civil rights movement, but it was never finally destroyed. It went underground. It waited. It rebuilt its intellectual class through the postwar conservative movement, its political class through the Southern Strategy, its religious class through the New Right and the Moral Majority, its paramilitary class through the militia movement of the 1990s and the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters of the 2010s, its media class through Fox News and talk radio and then Substack and Rumble and X. The structure has been reassembling itself for fifty years.

What has changed in the last decade is that the structure has acquired a new sponsor. The traditional Southern restorationist project did not have, on its own, the financial resources to challenge the post-1965 American mainstream. It had, in 2010, perhaps a half-dozen billionaires of national consequence and a much larger constituency of mid-sized regional wealth. What the Thiel turn and the Musk turn and the larger tech-class turn of the late 2010s and early 2020s gave the project was capital at a scale the project had never previously commanded. Combined with the Gulf-state rentier money that has been flowing into the tech class since the Saudi PIF stake in xAI and the Qatar stake in Anthropic and the UAE’s MGX stake in OpenAI, the project now commands financial resources that exceed those of the legacy political and media institutions that the project is attempting to displace.

The project’s strategic objective is not merely electoral victory. The project’s strategic objective is constitutional displacement. It is the replacement of the post-Reconstruction American constitutional order with a new order that explicitly repudiates the proposition that all human beings are created equal — that explicitly repudiates the Reconstruction Amendments, that explicitly retires the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that explicitly returns sovereignty to the states in matters of voting and education and labor, and that explicitly transfers ultimate executive authority to a national CEO who can suspend the constitutional protections that have, for the project’s intellectual class, been the obstacle to the project for a hundred and sixty years.

This is what Stephens proposed in Savannah in 1861. This is what Fitzhugh proposed in Cannibals All!. This is what Calhoun proposed in A Disquisition on Government. This is what Carlyle proposed in Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. This is what Yarvin has spent fifteen years proposing under various names. This is what Vance is currently proposing under the cover of populist masculinity. This is what Deneen proposes under the cover of postliberal political theory. This is what the operators are proposing now, in 2026, with the full apparatus of the executive branch and a coalition of donors that includes the wealthiest petro-state sovereign wealth funds on the planet.

The project is what it has always been. The project is the cornerstone Stephens named. The project is a fascism older than fascism.

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I want to close by saying something about what this means for the labor of the middle road.

If the project on the right flank is a fascism older than fascism, then the labor of the middle road is not merely the labor of refusing the contemporary form of the project. It is the labor of finally completing the work the Reconstruction did not finish. It is the labor of the third American founding.

The first founding was 1787. It produced a republic compromised at birth by the three-fifths compromise and the slave trade clause and the fugitive slave clause. The second founding was 1865 to 1877, the Reconstruction. It produced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the seating of Black legislators, the establishment of public schools, the attempt at land redistribution — and it was killed in its crib by the Compromise of 1877 and the long withdrawal of federal will. The third founding is the one we have been trying to complete for the last sixty years, since the civil rights movement, and that the project on the right flank is trying to prevent us from finishing.

The third founding is the labor of finally making a more perfect union mean what it says. It is the labor of finally completing the destruction of the state within a state. It is the labor of finally laying the cornerstone Stephens repudiated — the cornerstone the original Republic was supposed to be founded on, the cornerstone that the Reconstruction Amendments were supposed to install, the cornerstone that the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make real, the cornerstone that Magnifica Humanitas names again in our own moment and that Towards a More Perfect Union called us to walk toward.

The cornerstone is the human person, equal in dignity to every other human person, under the equal protection of the law.

That is the cornerstone the Confederacy explicitly rejected. That is the cornerstone the postliberal project is currently working to remove. That is the cornerstone the relay has been carrying since 1776, since 1865, since 1965, since this morning when I sat down to write this.

The cornerstone is still there. The cornerstone has been there from the beginning. The cornerstone was not destroyed by the Compromise of 1877 or by Jim Crow or by Charlottesville or by Yarvin or by Vance. The cornerstone is in the Declaration. The cornerstone is in the Fourteenth Amendment. The cornerstone is in the Voting Rights Act. The cornerstone is in Magnifica Humanitas. The cornerstone is in every voter who walks into a precinct in 2026, in every teacher who tells the children the truth about Reconstruction, in every journalist who refuses the cover story, in every citizen who picks up the relay and carries it one more leg.

The fascists have a cornerstone. The fascists have always had one. Stephens named it on March 21, 1861, and it has never been retired by the people who believe in it.

We have a cornerstone too. The republic’s cornerstone. The one Jefferson laid imperfectly, the one Lincoln re-laid in the Second Inaugural, the one the Reconstruction Amendments tried to make permanent, the one the civil rights generation died for, the one we have inherited and are responsible for handing forward.

The work, in 2026, is to make sure our cornerstone holds.

We finish what the Reconstruction did not finish.

We complete the third founding.

We make a more perfect union mean what it says.

The fascism is older than the fascists. The republic is older than the fascism. The relay is older than both.

We carry it on.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Communists to my left, fascists to my right, I shall take the middle road.

That is the sentence. That is the whole sentence. I will spend the rest of the piece trying to be worthy of it, but I will not improve upon it, and I want to put it at the top, alone, so that it can do its work before the apparatus of explanation arrives to dilute it.

It is not a centrist’s sentence. The centrist’s sentence is the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That sentence is a lie. The truth does not lie in the middle. The truth lies where the truth lies, which is sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left and sometimes nowhere on the inherited spectrum at all. The centrist’s sentence is the sentence of a man who has decided that he will not have to choose, that the cost of judgment can be split, that the people on his right and the people on his left can each be granted half a point and the conversation can move on.

The sentence I am borrowing is a different sentence. It is the sentence of a person who has looked at the people on his left and the people on his right and concluded that both flanks are serving the same operation by different costumes, and that the road forward is not between them but past them, on a separate axis they cannot see because they have spent their analytical capacity insisting that the only axis is the one with them on it.

The middle road, in this sentence, is not the middle of their road. It is a different road. It is the road the Preamble named.

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The American Founders did not write we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal because they had achieved a perfect union. They had not. The Constitution they wrote contained the three-fifths compromise, permitted the international slave trade for twenty years, gave us the Electoral College and the Senate’s small-state bias and a hundred other features any honest critic can list. They knew it was imperfect. They wrote, in the Preamble’s first sentence, that the purpose of the document was to form a more perfect Union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one. The verb was comparative. The verb conceded that the union they were founding was already imperfect and required a labor across generations to be made less so.

That labor is the relay I described two pieces back. It is the inheritance the dead handed us and that we are required, by the fact of having received it, to hand forward in better condition than we received it. The labor is the substance of citizenship. It is what put something back meant in the piece I wrote on Saturday. It is what Tom Steyer is asking for when he asks Californians to elect him in 2026.

The labor has had enemies in every generation. In the generation of the founders, the enemies were the Tories who wanted to remain a colony and the slavers who wanted to remain slavers. In the generation of Lincoln, the enemies were the Confederates and the Copperheads. In the generation of the Reconstruction, the enemies were the Klan and the Redeemers. In the generation of the Progressives, the enemies were the trusts and the Pinkertons. In the generation of the New Deal, the enemies were the America Firsters and the German-American Bund. In the generation of the Civil Rights Movement, the enemies were the segregationists and the Bull Connors. In our generation the enemies are postliberals on one flank and campists on the other, and the donors who fund both flanks from the same petro-AI rentier coalition that has been buying our democracy on the installment plan since the day the Soviet Union collapsed.

The labor has had enemies. The labor has also had stewards. In every generation the stewards have been the people who refused both flanks and kept walking the middle road, which is to say, kept walking the road of the Preamble. Frederick Douglass kept walking. Lincoln kept walking. The grand-children of the abolitionists who founded the NAACP kept walking. Eleanor Roosevelt kept walking. John Lewis kept walking across the bridge at Selma while the segregationists came at him from one flank and the Black nationalist critique of nonviolence came at him from the other, and he kept walking because the road he was walking was older than either flank, and the destination he was walking toward was older too. The destination was a more perfect union. He believed, as Lincoln had believed, that the words on the parchment meant what they said and could be made, by labor, to mean it more truly with each generation.

This is the relay. This is what we have been handed. This is what the operators on both flanks have been trying, in our generation, to convince us is no longer worth carrying.

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The postliberals say the union cannot be perfected because the Constitution is exhausted. They say the experiment has failed. They quote Patrick Deneen and they read Curtis Yarvin and they say what J. D. Vance said to James Pogue: that the regime is decadent, that the answer is a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator, that the architecture must be replaced. They mean what they say. They have the donor list to back it up. They have, by now, the executive branch. They are not pretending. The piece I wrote yesterday on the war on terror named the operators behind them. The piece I wrote two days ago on the cover stories named the apparatus.

The campists say the union cannot be perfected because the union is the problem. They say American constitutionalism is a fig leaf for American empire and that the only honest politics is the politics of supporting whichever rival empire is currently against us. They mean what they say. They have the funding pipeline I documented this morning to back it up. They have the YouTube channels and the Substacks and the conference invitations and the tote bags reading Communications as Solidarity. They are not pretending either. The Singham network is real. The Tenet Media indictment is real. The Russophile Congress representative credential is real.

Both flanks have given up on the Preamble. Both flanks have given up on the verb to form. Both flanks have decided that the more-perfect-union project is over, either because the founders’ design is now a prison or because the founders’ design was always a fraud.

The middle road is the road of the people who have not given up on the verb.

It is the road of the people who can hold, simultaneously, that American empire has done immense damage and must be opposed in every place it does damage, and that the American constitutional order is one of the few inheritances on the planet under which an immigrant child can grow up to be a senator, a Black sharecropper’s granddaughter can grow up to be a vice president, a Catholic Pope can write an encyclical on the dignity of the person and have it read on the floor of the legislature of a republic founded by Protestants who did not trust Catholics. It is the road of the people who can hold that the Founders were imperfect men whose imperfections were written into the document, and that the document also contained the keys for its own correction — the amendment process, the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the suffrage extensions, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the long unfolding of we the people from a phrase that originally meant white male property-holders to a phrase that now means, in law if not yet in fact, all of us.

The middle road is the road of the people who refuse to confuse the imperfection of the inheritance with the impossibility of the labor. The road of the people who refuse to let the operators on either flank persuade them that the verb to form has been retired.

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I want to put down a temperament here, because the road requires a temperament before it requires a program.

Lincoln gave us the temperament in the Second Inaugural. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. That sentence is the moral architecture of the middle road. Malice toward none — not because the operators do not deserve malice but because the labor of the union is incompatible with malice as a continuing disposition. Charity for all — not because all positions deserve equal charity but because charity is the discipline that keeps the laborer from becoming what he opposes. Firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right — and here is where Lincoln resolves the question that the postliberals and the campists are both trying to dodge. The right is not relative. The right is not what the camp decides. The right is what the laborer can see by the light he has been given, and the firmness is the requirement that he act on what he sees, even when the camp on his left and the camp on his right are screaming at him to choose theirs instead.

This is not centrism. Centrism would say: split the difference between Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart. Lincoln did not split the difference. Lincoln went to war. The middle road in 1864 went straight through Atlanta and Savannah and Petersburg and Appomattox. It was not the middle road because it was halfway between the two flanks. It was the middle road because it was the road of the union, and the union was the thing the flanks had set themselves against.

The middle road in 1944 went through the Bulge and Iwo Jima. It was not the middle road because it was halfway between the fascists in Berlin and the Stalinists in Moscow. It was the middle road because it was the road of the constitutional democracies, fighting one totalitarianism in alliance with another and going home, after the first one was beaten, to spend the next forty-five years restraining the one they had partnered with. That partnership cost what it cost. The accounting will never be balanced. It was, however, the middle road, because the road that mattered was the road of the constitutional inheritance.

The middle road in 2026 goes through the same kind of difficult country. It refuses Curtis Yarvin and it refuses Jackson Hinkle. It refuses Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures and it refuses Neville Roy Singham’s two hundred and seventy-five million dollars of Chinese state propaganda. It refuses J. D. Vance’s regime-change postliberalism and it refuses Code Pink’s apologetics for Xinjiang. It refuses Tucker Carlson’s pilgrimage to Moscow and it refuses The Grayzone’s defense of Bashar al-Assad. It refuses both flanks because both flanks are funded, in significant part, by the same petro-AI rentier coalition, and the coalition does not care which flank wins. The coalition cares only that the middle road be discredited, that the verb to form be retired, that the Preamble be allowed to gather dust while the documents that will replace it are drafted in Palo Alto and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Moscow and Beijing.

The middle road refuses. The middle road says: the verb stands. The work continues. The relay goes forward.

⁂

I want to be specific about what walking the middle road looks like, because vague exhortation is the failure mode of the kind of writing I have been doing this week, and the readers deserve better than vague.

It looks like voting. It looks like voting in the primary and the general and the off-year and the special election and the school board and the water district. It looks like understanding that the operators count on you to skip the school board because you have decided that the presidency is the only office that matters, and that they have been quietly capturing the school boards for thirty years while you were watching cable news. It looks like Tom Steyer winning the California gubernatorial primary on March 3, 2026, which is now ninety-one days away, because Californians showed up at the polls in numbers the operators were not expecting. It looks like the citizen labor that the operators have spent forty years and untold billions trying to convince you is futile, performed in the small disciplined acts that constitute it.

It looks like donating. It looks like five dollars to the campaign you believe in and five more to the local journalist trying to keep a newsroom alive in a county where the Gannett paper closed in 2019 and the operators have been filling the information vacuum with Russian-funded and Chinese-funded and Thiel-funded content ever since. It looks like the small subscription you make to the publication that does not capture you for a flank, to the writer who is trying to walk the middle road in plain sight, to the institution that has not yet been bought.

It looks like writing. Not all of us will write in public. Some of us will write letters to the editor. Some of us will write comments under the pieces that move us, the way Cecelia Blair commented on The Longest Relay this morning and lifted the level of the entire conversation by the seriousness with which she had read. Some of us will write to our representatives, knowing that the staff member who reads the constituent mail counts the letters and reports the count up the chain. Some of us will write the long argument we have been holding inside for years and put it in front of the people who know us, because the people who know us are the people most likely to be moved by what we say.

It looks like witness. It looks like refusing to look away. It looks like reading James Pogue’s piece. It looks like reading the New York Times Singham investigation. It looks like reading the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Office of Special Plans. It looks like reading the Judicial Watch documents on the Cheney Energy Task Force. The records are on the internet. The internet still works, for the moment, the way an archive works. The middle road begins, every morning, with the discipline of reading the documents the operators have been counting on you not to read.

It looks like refusing the cover stories. It looks like noticing, when the conspiracy theory arrives at the door, that the conspiracy theory is hiding the conspiracy. It looks like noticing, when the campist takes the side of Russia in Ukraine, that the campist is not opposing American empire but transferring his loyalty to a different empire. It looks like noticing, when the postliberal calls for a national CEO, that the national CEO is the cover for the donor class behind him. It looks like the small daily act of refusing to be taken in.

It looks like mercy. The temperament of the middle road is mercy. The operators on both flanks have made themselves into hard men with hard answers and hard borders. The middle road requires a softer architecture. It requires the willingness to extend charity to the person who has been taken in, to the relative who has gone down the QAnon rabbit hole or the cousin who has gone down the Grayzone rabbit hole, to keep the door open for their return, to remember that the same propaganda machine that has captured them has been working on you and the only difference is that on a particular question on a particular morning the propaganda did not catch. The middle road is not the road of the smug. The middle road is the road of the merciful, who know that they themselves have been wrong about important things and that their being right today is not their own achievement.

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There is a religious dimension to this that I cannot avoid and will not pretend to.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued on May 15 of this year and formally promulgated on May 25, is the most serious answer I have read to the project Peter Thiel laid out in his Palazzo Orsini Antichrist lectures in Rome in March. Thiel’s lectures argued, more or less openly, that the katechon — the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist in Saint Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians — must in our moment be a strong man who will suspend the normal order to prevent the worse strong man from arriving. The argument is two thousand years old. Augustine refuted it. Constantine partially refuted it by accident. Every emperor who has tried it since has produced exactly the worse strong man the argument promised to prevent.

Leo’s answer in Magnifica Humanitas is the older answer. The katechon is not a strong man. The katechon is the human person, in the dignity given to the person by the imago Dei, refusing the offers that would diminish the person. The disarmament of AI that the encyclical calls for is the disarmament of the offers. The dignity of the worker, of the migrant, of the elder, of the unborn, of the prisoner, of the soldier, of the dissident — the dignity of each of them, defended against the systems that would reduce them to inputs in a production function — is the katechon of our moment.

I am not a Catholic. I am writing this on a Sunday morning in May after a week in which I have published nine pieces that have, in their different ways, attempted to defend the same proposition Leo defended in his encyclical. The proposition is older than the Church. It is in the Hebrew prophets. It is in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. It is in the prophet’s refusal to flatter the king. It is in the prophet’s insistence that the widow and the orphan and the stranger are the measure of the kingdom. It is in the writing of Simone Weil, who was my first prophet and remains my closest, and who taught me that affliction is the door through which the truth enters a society and is recognized.

The middle road, in this dimension, is the road of the people who can hold simultaneously that they may be religious or not religious, that their tradition may be Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or none, and that the ethical claim — the person is the measure, the person under power is the question, the person’s dignity is the katechon — is binding upon them regardless of where they have come to it from. The middle road is ecumenical. It accepts that the road has been walked by people who arrived at it through every door, and that the test of the walker is not the door he came in through but the road he keeps walking after he is inside.

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I want to come back, before I close, to the sentence at the top.

Communists to my left, fascists to my right, I shall take the middle road. It is, I now realize, a sentence that has been waiting for a generation. It is a sentence in the lineage of Lincoln’s malice toward none. It is a sentence in the lineage of Orwell’s if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. It is a sentence in the lineage of Bebel’s socialism of fools. It is a sentence in the lineage of Hitchens’s regiment of useful idiots and of Applebaum’s New Puritans. It is a sentence in the lineage of every writer who has stood on the road that runs past the flanks and tried to keep walking while both flanks were screaming at him to come in.

The flanks will keep screaming. The screaming is the operation. The screaming is what the rentier coalition has purchased on both ends. The middle road is the road the screaming is designed to drown out.

We are not going to be drowned out. We are going to keep walking. Some days the walking will look like writing nine pieces in seventy-two hours. Some days the walking will look like reading a single document the operators were counting on us not to read. Some days the walking will look like voting. Some days the walking will look like staying in the marriage, paying the taxes, raising the kids, going to the school board meeting, picking up the trash on the block, calling the elderly neighbor whose husband died in March. The walking is the union. The union is the people, walking in the same direction, across the generations, toward a destination none of us will reach in our own lifetimes and all of us are responsible for carrying the relay one more leg toward.

A more perfect union. Not a perfect one. More perfect. The comparative verb. The labor of the centuries.

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I am going to close with the words that closed Lincoln’s First Inaugural, because the moment we are in is the moment he was in, and because the words have not lost their force in the hundred and sixty-five years since he spoke them.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The chords are still there. The graves are still there. The hearthstones are still there. The better angels have not been retired by the operators, however hard they have worked to retire them. The chorus will swell again. It will swell because we, the witnesses, the laborers, the walkers on the middle road, will keep walking and writing and voting and donating and witnessing and refusing the cover stories until the chorus is louder than the screaming on the flanks.

We will keep walking. The road is older than the operators. The road is older than the screaming. The road is the road of the Preamble, of the Reconstruction Amendments, of the Voting Rights Act, of Magnifica Humanitas, of Leo and of Lincoln and of Bebel and of Orwell and of Hitchens at his best and of Weil at hers and of every quiet citizen in every quiet town who has, in every generation, picked up the relay and carried it the next leg.

Pick it up.

Carry it.

Hand it on.

Toward a more perfect union.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In 1894, the German socialist August Bebel, leader of the Social Democratic Party and one of the most morally serious figures of his political generation, was attempting to describe a peculiar phenomenon he kept encountering on his own side of the political map. Among the people who called themselves socialists, there was a tendency to direct the rage that ought to have been directed at capitalism instead at the Jews, on the grounds that Jews were the visible face of capital and therefore the proper target of working-class anger. Bebel disagreed. He thought the move was a corruption of socialism, a redirection of legitimate grievance into illegitimate channels, a substitution of the easy hatred of an identifiable group for the hard work of analyzing and confronting the actual system. He called it the socialism of fools. The phrase passed into the language. It became the standard term for any politics that wears the costume of liberation while serving as a delivery mechanism for an older and uglier hatred.

I want to borrow Bebel’s frame this morning and apply it to a phenomenon I have watched grow in my own political adjacency over the last twenty years.

There is, on the left, a politics that calls itself anti-imperialist. The politics opposes American wars, American sanctions, American military bases, American influence in the affairs of other nations. So far so good. I oppose those things too, when they are wrong, which is a great deal of the time, and the piece I published yesterday was a long accounting of one of the largest cases in which they were wrong. American empire has done enormous damage to the world. The dead of Iraq and Vietnam and Indonesia and Chile and Iran and Guatemala and Nicaragua and the Philippines and a hundred other places where we put our boots or our money on the wrong side of a struggle that was not ours — those dead are real. The case against American empire is documented and overwhelming.

But there is a place where the politics of opposing American empire goes wrong. There is a place where it stops being a critique of one empire and becomes an apologetics for every other empire that opposes it. There is a place where the slogan anti-imperialism stops referring to the principle that no nation should rule others by force and starts referring to the strategic position that whichever nation is rivaling the United States this week is by definition the side of liberation. That is no longer anti-imperialism. That is multipolarity worship. That is the conviction that the world is made just by being made bloodier — by adding more poles, more fists, more rival hegemons, more spheres of influence in which strongmen can crush their domestic populations without American interference.

This is the anti-imperialism of fools. And like Bebel’s socialism of fools, it is almost always, when one follows the money, funded directly or indirectly by exactly the imperial powers it claims to be defending against the dominant one.

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The doctrine has a name in the academic literature. It is called campism. The term comes from the Cold War — the conviction that the world was divided into two camps, the imperialist camp and the anti-imperialist camp, and that the duty of every leftist was to support the anti-imperialist camp without qualification, without criticism, and without regard to what the rulers of that camp were doing to the workers and dissidents and minorities and journalists and ordinary people inside their own borders.

Campism was always a betrayal of socialism. It was the position that allowed Western communist parties to defend the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the murder of every Polish and Czech and Hungarian and East German worker who tried to organize a real labor movement against a regime that called itself the workers’ state. Campism was the doctrine that justified all of it, every time, on the grounds that to oppose Moscow was to objectively serve Washington, and that to serve Washington was the one sin from which no leftist could be redeemed.

George Orwell, who knew the type, called them the renegades. He had served alongside them in Spain. He had watched them denounce the POUM and the anarchists as objectively fascist for the crime of being anti-Stalinist. He had watched them defend the Stalinist murder of Andreu Nin and the thousands of others who refused to subordinate the Spanish revolution to Moscow’s foreign policy. He spent the rest of his life writing against them. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are, among other things, prolonged meditations on what happens to a politics of liberation when it accepts the discipline of an imperial center that wears the costume of liberation.

The Soviet Union fell. The discipline did not. The campist habit of mind survived, looked around for new centers to defer to, and found them. The new centers were Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Caracas. The new costumes were multipolarity, the global majority, the rising South, the resistance axis. The new vocabulary was lifted, sometimes word for word, from the foreign ministries and state media outlets of the regimes the new campists were defending. The new media ecosystem was built on platforms — YouTube, Substack, X, Rumble — that allowed direct unfiltered transmission from the foreign-ministry talking point to the English-speaking activist’s eyeballs without the inconvenience of editorial review. The new funding flowed through a system of nonprofits and intermediaries that the United States Department of Justice and the United States Treasury Department and the United States Department of State have, by the time I am writing this, been investigating for over three years.

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The document this time is not in a magazine. It is in The New York Times.

On August 5, 2023, the Times published a long investigation, conducted over months by Mara Hvistendahl and David Kirkpatrick and Ishaan Jhaveri, with the headline A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul. The investigation documented the funding network of a man named Neville Roy Singham. Singham is a former technology executive who sold his consultancy firm, Thoughtworks, for an estimated seven hundred and eighty-five million dollars in 2017 and then moved to Shanghai. Since that move, by the Times’ accounting, he has funneled at least two hundred and seventy-five million dollars through a network of American nonprofits — many of them with no real physical address beyond UPS Store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York — into a constellation of left-coded media outlets, think tanks, and activist organizations that consistently produce content aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy positions.

The recipient organizations include Code Pink, which the Times documented as having received over one and a third million dollars from Singham-linked sources since 2017, and which is run by Jodie Evans, who is married to Singham. They include The People’s Forum in Manhattan, which received over twenty-two million dollars from a single Singham-linked nonprofit. They include BreakThrough News, the YouTube channel and media operation. They include No Cold War, a coalition that organizes against American criticism of Chinese policy. They include NewsClick in India, which was raided by Indian authorities in late 2023 on charges of foreign funding violations. They include Brasil de Fato. They include outlets in South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, and several other countries.

Singham is photographed at Chinese Communist Party propaganda forums. He has co-owned, with Chinese state partners, media companies that operate in coordination with municipal propaganda departments. His network’s content is regularly amplified by official Chinese state media, including the Global Times and the China Daily, in a feedback loop that produces the appearance of a grassroots Western anti-imperialist consensus that just happens to mirror the position of one specific imperial power on every contested question.

The Times called and emailed every organization in the network. Most declined to respond. The ones that did respond denied taking direction from any foreign government. They did not deny taking the money. The structure they described was one in which the money came from American nonprofits, the nonprofits in turn received their money from intermediaries, and the intermediaries received their money from Singham — and Singham, the man at the head of the chain, lives in Shanghai, attends Party workshops, and co-produces propaganda content with Chinese state entities.

The structure is the same structure I described yesterday on the right. A funding apparatus that purchases not loyalty but compatibility. A funding apparatus that does not need to issue instructions, because the recipients have selected themselves for ideological alignment and the funding merely enables them to do at scale what they would have done at small scale anyway. The money does not buy positions. The money buys volume. It buys reach. It buys the multiplication of voices saying the things the funder wants said, and it buys the silencing — through opportunity cost, through career incentive, through community pressure — of the voices that would otherwise have said the contrary things.

This is what Singham bought with his two hundred and seventy-five million dollars. He bought a Western left that, in the year of our Lord 2026, when the Chinese government has built a system of internment camps in Xinjiang holding an estimated one million Uyghurs, when it has crushed the Hong Kong democracy movement, when it is mobilizing for the possible invasion of Taiwan, when it operates a social-credit surveillance state more comprehensive than anything Orwell imagined — a Western left, parts of which can no longer bring themselves to issue an unequivocal condemnation of any of it. He bought the silence. And in some cases he bought louder than silence: he bought the affirmative defense.

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I want to name the figures. Not all of them — the network is too large for any one piece — but the most clearly documented, because the piece does not work as accusation by category. It works only as accusation by name, with documents.

Jackson Hinkle is a self-described MAGA communist whose YouTube and X channels reach an audience in the millions. He attended a conference of the Houthi rebels in Yemen in 2024. He was present at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, when Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike. He was designated, by the second international gathering of the Russophile Congress in Moscow in 2024, as an official Western representative. The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers, in a report cited by the New York Post in May 2025, identified him as having publicly claimed to have vetted Russian intelligence and strong ties with both Russia and Iran. He denies, on his channels, accepting direct payment from any foreign government. The denial is not the question. The question is what business an American citizen has serving as the designated Western representative of a Russophile Congress in Moscow during an active Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

The Grayzone, edited by Max Blumenthal and featuring Aaron Maté and Wyatt Reed, has for the past decade produced content defending the Assad regime in Syria, the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, the Russian government’s positions on Ukraine, the Iranian government’s positions on basically everything, and the Chinese government’s positions on Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Blumenthal has stated, repeatedly, that the outlet receives no state funding from Russia or China. In June 2024, The Washington Post reported that hacked documents revealed Wyatt Reed had received approximately five thousand five hundred dollars from the Iranian state-controlled broadcaster Press TV for occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021. The 2023 European Union sanctions package identified the outlet as receiving financing from the Russian government. A 2024 New Lines Magazine investigation documented a thirty-thousand-dollar single donation to a Grayzone GoFundMe from the legal name of Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd bassist who has spent his retirement years offering himself as a spokesperson for the Russian position on Ukraine and the Chinese position on Xinjiang.

Tucker Carlson, who is a man of the right but who I include here because the horseshoe is real, traveled to Moscow in February 2024 to conduct a two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin in which he allowed Putin to deliver an uninterrupted lecture on the historical illegitimacy of the Ukrainian state and the supposed Nazi character of its government. The interview aired on Tucker’s X channel and was promoted by Russian state media for weeks. Tucker has since traveled to Russia repeatedly. He has spoken at Russian government conferences. He has been featured in Russian state media as the proof that the Western elite consensus on the war is breaking down. He is not paid by the Russian government as far as anyone can document. He does not need to be. The platform he occupies and the audience he reaches are themselves the payment, and the access is the consideration he gives in return.

The Tenet Media indictment. In September 2024, the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that two employees of RT, the Russian state media company, had channeled nearly ten million dollars through shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Mauritius to a Tennessee-based content firm called Tenet Media. Tenet Media in turn paid the right-wing influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson — Pool reportedly receiving one hundred thousand dollars per video, Rubin reportedly receiving four hundred thousand dollars per month plus a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus. The influencers say they did not know the money came from Russia. Whether they knew or not, the money came from Russia, the content they produced was consistent with Russian foreign policy goals, and the operation worked. The mechanism on the right is the same mechanism on the left. The funder does not need the recipient to know the source. The funder needs only the volume.

Code Pink I have already covered. The figures are public: one and a third million dollars from Singham-linked sources, twenty-five percent of their funding since 2017, the husband-wife structure with Singham and Jodie Evans, the photographs of Singham at Chinese Communist Party propaganda workshops, the consistent alignment of Code Pink’s foreign policy positions with the positions of the Chinese government from Hong Kong to Xinjiang to Taiwan.

I could go on. Jeffrey Sachs, the once-respected development economist who has spent the years since the COVID pandemic delivering speeches at Beijing and Moscow conferences in which he restates the Russian and Chinese foreign-ministry positions on the war in Ukraine and the origins of the pandemic. Glenn Greenwald, whose journalism on the surveillance state was once important and who has, since moving to Brazil and founding The Intercept Brasil and then leaving it, become a Rumble-and-Tucker-circuit voice whose every position is the Kremlin position. Tulsi Gabbard, who flew to Damascus in 2017 to meet with Bashar al-Assad during the chemical-weapons campaign against his own people, who appeared regularly on Russian state media for years afterward, and who now sits as Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.

There are others. The list is long. The list could be longer. The list would, if exhaustively compiled, account for a substantial percentage of the English-language commentary that is currently presented to American audiences under the label independent journalism on platforms that have been built specifically to bypass the editorial gatekeeping of the legacy press. Some of these voices were independent journalists once. Some of them still produce work that contains real information. The point of the piece is not to denounce them root and branch. The point of the piece is to name the structure they sit inside and to ask the question their audiences cannot apparently bring themselves to ask.

If your analysis of every contested international question is the analysis of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Caracas, you are not an anti-imperialist. You are an asset.

⁂

The deeper problem is conceptual.

The campist mind imagines that the world is made just by being made multipolar. Whatever crimes the rival powers commit, they commit, in this imagination, in service of resistance. The dissidents they imprison are agents of the West. The journalists they murder were spies. The minorities they sterilize were terrorists. The wars of aggression they launch are defensive responses to NATO expansion. The election they steal at home was actually a defense of democracy against Western interference. The genocide they commit against a people inside their own borders is counter-insurgency. Every word the rival empire uses to justify its crimes is accepted at face value, and every word the American empire uses to justify its crimes is interrogated to the bone, and the interrogator never notices that he is doing the work of one of the regimes he claims to oppose by selectively suspending his analytical capacity in front of its propaganda.

The conceptual error is the assumption that the rival is, by virtue of being the rival, the morally superior pole. This is not anti-imperialism. This is the politics of choosing the imperialism one happens to find aesthetically more congenial. And the choice is almost always made on grounds that have nothing to do with the conditions of the workers, the dissidents, the women, the minorities, the journalists, the gay people, the Muslims, the Christians, the Falun Gong practitioners, the trade unionists, the protest organizers, the political prisoners, or the disappeared inside the borders of the resistance power. The choice is made on grounds of vibes. The vibes are the vibes of Cold War nostalgia, of the sense that there was once a left that mattered because it had a state behind it, of the desire to belong to something larger than the dwindling congregation of American social democrats. The vibes are paid for by Singham and by Putin’s foreign-ministry budget and by the Iranian Press TV budget and by the Saudi-funded conferences and by the Qatari think-tank money that, on a different but parallel circuit, also funds the Doha-based commentariat that produces a different but compatible set of takes.

The vibes are the product. The vibes are what the money buys.

⁂

I want to come back to Hitchens, because he spent the last decade of his life on this question and I do not think the piece can close without him.

Hitchens broke with the campist left over Bosnia. He had watched the British and American left of his generation, the people he had marched with against Vietnam and against Reagan and against the South African regime, decline to support intervention against a clearly genocidal Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims because the intervention would be led by NATO and would have an American component. He had watched them produce, in the pages of the London Review of Books and The New Left Review and the comment sections of every other publication of his political milieu, denialist and revisionist accounts of the Srebrenica massacre, of the Sarajevo siege, of the systematic mass rape of Bosnian women, on the grounds that to acknowledge these crimes would be to objectively support American imperial intervention against a sovereign socialist state.

It was over Bosnia that Hitchens decided the left he had grown up in was finished. The left had failed the Bosnian test. The left had said: the suffering of Muslim civilians in Europe is not a sufficient warrant for action if the action will be led by the United States. The left had said: the principle of non-intervention overrides the principle of human solidarity in the face of genocide. The left had thereby revealed that its anti-imperialism was not a moral position. It was a tribal position. It was a uniform.

Hitchens stopped wearing the uniform. He spent the rest of his life arguing, sometimes with extraordinary brutality, against the people who continued to wear it. He called them, in print, the renegades, the apologists, the ventriloquists’ dummies, the smelly little orthodoxies, the regiment of useful idiots. He had Orwell’s vocabulary. He had Orwell’s targets. He spent his last book, Hitch-22, in significant part settling accounts with the people he had once marched with who had now decided that any opposition to any tyrant who happened to oppose the United States was neoconservatism in disguise.

The trap closed on Hitchens over Iraq. The trap was that the campist left had been so consistently wrong about so many other interventions — about Bosnia, about Kosovo, about Afghanistan in 2001 — that when the question of Iraq came up, Hitchens had spent his moral capital and his analytical capacity on the assumption that his opponents would, once again, be defending a brutal regime against a justifiable removal. He could not, by the time the Iraq question was on the table, see that this time the campists were right by accident — right not because they had analyzed the situation correctly but because they were against the war for the same reflexive reasons they were against every American war, and the war this time was as they reflexively assumed it to be: a war for the oil, a war for the donor class, a war that would produce hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and a generation of new jihadism and the eventual rise of the Islamic State.

Hitchens was wrong about Iraq for the reasons I laid out yesterday. The campists were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons. Both things are true. The piece I wrote yesterday and the piece I am writing today have to be read together, because each is incomplete without the other.

The lesson is not that one side was correct and the other was deluded. The lesson is that there are two distinct failure modes available to people who set themselves up as critics of empire. The first failure mode is Hitchens’s — to be so impatient with the apologists for the rival empire that one ends up co-signing the operations of one’s own. The second failure mode is the campists’ — to be so impatient with one’s own empire that one ends up co-signing the operations of the rival. Both are failures of judgment. Both are produced by the same underlying confusion, which is the confusion between opposing imperialism and taking a side in a contest between imperialisms.

The actual anti-imperialist position is the third position. It is the position that opposes the crimes of every empire on the basis of the principle that no people has the right to be ruled by force, foreign or domestic, against its will. It is the position that defends the Uyghurs against Beijing and the Ukrainians against Moscow and the Iranian women against the Iranian regime and the Saudi dissidents against Riyadh and the Palestinians against everyone who has been using them as a chess piece for seventy-five years, and also the Iraqis against the United States, and the Vietnamese against the United States, and the Chileans against Kissinger, and the Iranians against the United States in 1953, and the Hondurans against Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and on and on.

It is the position Hitchens started from and lost his footing on. It is the position the campists never reached. It is the position that has no state to fund it, no foreign ministry to amplify it, no think-tank circuit to platform it, and very little media infrastructure to carry it. It is the position I am trying, in these pages, to recover.

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The deepest scandal is that the same forces that have purchased the postliberal right that James Pogue documented have also, through different channels, purchased significant portions of the campist left. The same petro-AI rentier coalition that funds J. D. Vance and Curtis Yarvin through the Thiel apparatus and through the Saudi PIF stake in xAI and through the Qatar Investment Authority’s stake in Anthropic also funds, through different intermediaries, the left-coded media ecosystem that defends every regime hostile to the United States. The right end of the horseshoe and the left end of the horseshoe both bend toward the same source of money. The donors at the right end are buying a postliberal political class that will dismantle American democracy from within. The donors at the left end are buying a campist commentariat that will provide cover for the actions of the donors’ own home regimes against their own home populations.

The horseshoe is not metaphorical. The horseshoe is a literal description of the funding topology of the contemporary American discourse. If you map the donors of the postliberal right and the donors of the campist left onto a single sheet of paper, you find that the two ends of the supposed political spectrum touch in the petro-states and the technology firms those petro-states have purchased. Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin in February 2024 and Code Pink defending Chinese policy in Xinjiang in 2026 are not opposing political positions. They are two arms of the same operation. The operation is the demolition of the American constitutional order’s capacity to resist the rentier coalition’s claim on the next century.

This is what the anti-imperialism of fools serves. The fools imagine they are speaking truth to American power. They are speaking the lines a different power has written for them, and the different power has, in some cases, written checks. The right end of the same operation imagines it is speaking truth to liberal hegemony. It is speaking the lines the same powers have written, and in some cases the same powers have, again, written checks. The two ends will, when the moment comes, find that they have been doing the same job for the same people the entire time.

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I want to close with a small remark about what this piece is and what it is not.

It is not an endorsement of American empire. American empire has done what I have already said it has done, and I will spend whatever years I have left writing against the part of it I can reach.

It is not a defense of the Cold War. The Cold War was a mutual production. The crimes of one side did not excuse the crimes of the other. The Iranian coup of 1953 and the Chilean coup of 1973 and the Indonesian massacre of 1965 and the Guatemalan coup of 1954 and the murders of Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende were American crimes. The Hungarian massacre of 1956 and the Czechoslovak invasion of 1968 and the murders of Andrei Sakharov’s friends and the Solzhenitsyn camps and the Cambodian genocide and the North Korean prison state were Communist crimes. Both columns of crimes are real. Both columns of crimes are documented. A serious leftism would have opposed both columns. The campist leftism opposed only the American column and treated the other column as the cost of resistance.

It is not a defense of the American intelligence community. The Senate Church Committee documented in 1975 a long history of American intelligence agencies engaged in operations that no democratic country should tolerate. The intelligence community has done enormous harm. The intelligence community has also, in many cases, told the truth about adversaries who really were adversaries and committed crimes those adversaries really had committed. The fact that the messenger has lied before does not mean the message is always false.

It is, instead, an argument for a kind of leftism that has become rare. It is an argument for the leftism of Bebel, who could see that anti-capitalism that becomes antisemitism has lost the plot. It is an argument for the leftism of Orwell, who could see that anti-fascism that becomes Stalinism has lost the plot. It is an argument for the leftism of Hitchens, who could see that anti-imperialism that becomes apologetics for rival empires has lost the plot — even though, in his own life, he could not see that anti-campism that becomes co-signing one’s own empire has also lost the plot.

The plot is the human person under power. The plot is the worker, the woman, the dissident, the minority, the journalist, the gay person, the religious person, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the killed. The plot is them, in every country that holds them, against every regime that holds them. The plot is not the geopolitical chess game. The plot is not the multipolar order. The plot is not the resistance axis or the global majority or the rising South or any of the other phrases the foreign ministries have planted in the mouths of the people who are paid, directly or indirectly, to repeat them.

The plot is the person under power. The whole plot.

If your politics has lost the plot, your politics has lost. It does not matter how many likes the videos get. It does not matter how many subscribers the channel has. It does not matter how many conference invitations and free hotel rooms and translated editions and tote bags reading Communications as Solidarity arrive in the mail. The plot is the person under power. If you have stopped defending the person under power because the power doing the holding happens to be in the camp you have chosen, you have stopped doing the work the word left was invented to name.

You have become an anti-imperialist of fools.

There is still time to come back. The door is open. Bebel left the door open. Orwell left the door open. Hitchens, when he was at his best, left the door open. I leave the door open here.

The work is on the other side of the door.

Go Deeper into the Circus

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen men, fifteen of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners and used three of them as weapons against the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The fourth was brought down by its passengers in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people died. The operation was conceived by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, planned and financed through al-Qaeda’s apparatus in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban government, and executed by men who had been living, training, and praying in the United States for the better part of two years. The 9/11 Commission Report documents this. The Senate Intelligence Committee documents this. The FBI files document this. The pre-attack intelligence — the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. — documents this.

9/11 was a conspiracy. It happened. The conspirators were named, the network was mapped, the protectors were identified. The documentary record is complete.

The conspiracy that came next was different.

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George W. Bush was, by the lights I can apply from this distance, a decent man.

I will say it first, before anything else the piece has to say about what was done in his name, because what was done is difficult to forgive, and the difficulty of it must not be allowed to bleed backward into a flat verdict on the man at the center of it. He was a believer. He prayed. He had given up drink. He loved his wife and his daughters and his dogs and his ranch. He had, in his governorship of Texas, behaved in ways that suggested an instinct for bipartisanship and a temperament not given to cruelty. When he stood on the rubble of the towers three days after the attacks, with the bullhorn and the firefighter beside him, and said that the people who knocked these buildings down would hear from all of us soon, he meant it the way a decent man means a vow at a graveside. He was not lying. He was not performing. He was responding, in the language available to him, to a wound the country had taken and to a duty he believed had fallen to him.

What I am about to describe is what was done to him, and what was done through him, by men who did not share his decency and who had been waiting, some of them for a decade, for exactly the kind of wound the country had just taken.

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In 1992, three months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Department of Defense circulated an internal document called the Defense Planning Guidance for fiscal years 1994 through 1999. The document was prepared under the authority of Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, with the drafting work done by Zalmay Khalilzad and I. Lewis Scooter Libby, and with the overall sponsorship of the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney. The document argued that, with the Soviet Union gone, the central strategic objective of the United States must be to prevent the emergence of any other power, anywhere in the world, capable of rivaling American military and economic supremacy. It argued for unilateral action where necessary. It argued for preemptive military force. It identified, by name and region, the theaters where the United States might have to fight in the coming decade in order to maintain its position. One of those theaters was Iraq.

The document leaked to The New York Times on March 7, 1992. The leak was greeted with public horror. Senators of both parties denounced it. The document was hastily revised, sanitized, and reissued in a softer version in April. Wolfowitz, asked about it years later, said the Times had exaggerated.

But the document existed. The thinking existed. The men who had written it remained in place — in think tanks, in defense contractors, in the universities, in the apparatus — for the eight years of the Clinton administration, waiting for the next Republican president and the next opportunity to put their planning into practice.

In 1997, several of these men founded the Project for the New American Century. The signatories of its founding Statement of Principles included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, and Dan Quayle. In January 1998 the Project for the New American Century sent an open letter to President Clinton calling for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The letter was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and others. The letter argued that containment of Iraq had failed, that diplomacy had failed, that sanctions had failed, and that only the removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement by a government friendly to American interests would secure the region’s oil supplies and prevent the rise of a hostile regional power. Clinton declined. The letter was published. It remains available, in its original form, on the open internet.

In September of 2000, two months before the presidential election, the Project for the New American Century released a longer document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The document called for a vast expansion of American military power, the establishment of permanent bases in the Persian Gulf, the development of an anti-missile shield, the militarization of space, and a fundamental reorientation of American defense policy toward preemptive war. It noted, in a passage that became infamous after the fact, that such a transformation was likely to be a long one in the absence of some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.

That sentence was published in September 2000. It was not a prediction. It was a wish.

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Dick Cheney was sworn in as Vice President of the United States on January 20, 2001. Within days, he had been put in charge of an entity called the National Energy Policy Development Group, which the press came to call the Energy Task Force. The Task Force met in secret. Its membership was concealed. Its agenda was concealed. Judicial Watch, the conservative legal organization, sued under the Freedom of Information Act for the records of the Task Force’s deliberations. The case went to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled, in a decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia after Scalia had gone duck-hunting with Cheney during the pendency of the case, that the Vice President was not required to disclose the Task Force’s membership or its proceedings.

Some of the Task Force’s documents did, however, emerge. In July 2003, Judicial Watch released a set of documents obtained from the Commerce Department under a parallel FOIA order. Among those documents, dated March 2001 — six months before the attacks of September 11 — were a detailed map of the oil fields, pipelines, refineries, and tanker terminals of Iraq, a chart titled Iraqi Oil and Gas Projects, and a second chart titled Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts. The documents named the foreign companies — French, Russian, Chinese — that had begun negotiating with the Saddam Hussein regime for post-sanctions access to Iraqi reserves. The documents made clear what was at stake. The documents were prepared, in March of 2001, by a task force chaired by a Vice President whose previous job had been the chief executive officer of Halliburton, the world’s largest oilfield services company, and whose previous job before that had been Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush during the first Gulf War. The documents are available, in their original form, on Judicial Watch’s website. Anyone can read them. They have been there for twenty-three years.

The Iraqi oil fields were on the table in March of 2001. The attacks of September 11 were the catalyzing event the Project for the New American Century had publicly wished for six months earlier. The decade-old Wolfowitz Doctrine of preventing the rise of any rival in the Persian Gulf was waiting in the same drawer as the Iraqi pipeline maps. The men who had written all of it were now sitting at the head of the table — Cheney in the West Wing, Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz as his deputy, Libby as Cheney’s chief of staff, Khalilzad on the National Security Council, Bolton at State, Perle on the Defense Policy Board.

Bush walked into the Oval Office on the morning of September 12, 2001, and the men who had been waiting since 1992 began to walk him through the plan.

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According to Richard Clarke, who was at the time the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, and who had served four presidents, the question of Iraq came up on the afternoon of September 11 itself. Rumsfeld asked, in a meeting at the White House, whether the attacks did not present an opportunity to go after Saddam. Clarke pointed out that the attacks had been carried out by al-Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan, and that Iraq had no documented connection to them. Rumsfeld replied that there were not enough good targets in Afghanistan, and that Iraq had better targets. Clarke recounts this conversation in his book, Against All Enemies. He recounts being asked by the President, on September 12, to find a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. Clarke replied that there was no such link. He was asked again. He replied again. The President, Clarke writes, did not seem satisfied with the answer.

The campaign to manufacture the link began almost immediately. It was run, in its most important early phase, out of an entity called the Office of Special Plans, established at the Pentagon under Douglas Feith. The Office of Special Plans was, as the Senate Intelligence Committee later documented, a parallel intelligence apparatus designed to stovepipe raw, unvetted, and in many cases knowingly false intelligence to the offices of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, bypassing the CIA’s analytical process. The Office of Special Plans was the conduit through which the Chalabi-supplied fabrications of Curveball and other Iraqi exile sources became the basis for public claims about weapons of mass destruction, mobile biological weapons laboratories, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, and yellowcake uranium purchases from Niger.

The yellowcake claim survived long enough to be inserted, despite the CIA’s repeated objections, into the President’s State of the Union address of January 28, 2003. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The sixteen words. The documents that the claim rested on were forgeries. The forgeries had been known to be forgeries by the Italian intelligence service. The CIA had been told, repeatedly, that the documents were forgeries. The sentence was put into the State of the Union anyway. The President of the United States read it from the teleprompter. A decent man reading a lie that had been placed in front of him by the men he trusted to write his speeches.

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, stood before the United Nations Security Council and presented what he described as the United States government’s case for the existence of an Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction program. He held up a small vial. He pointed to satellite photographs. He played intercepted communications. He spoke for over an hour. Almost everything he said was wrong. The aluminum tubes were not for uranium enrichment. The mobile biological weapons laboratories did not exist. The connections to al-Qaeda were not real. Powell, who had resisted the war privately and who had insisted on this UN presentation as a condition of his participation, was later to describe the speech as a blot on his record that would never be removed. He had been, in his word, played. He had also been used. He was the most respected man in the cabinet. He was the trusted face. He was the one whose voice would carry into the homes of skeptics and the chambers of allies. He was deployed because his credibility was the last asset the administration had not yet spent, and they spent it.

The invasion began on March 19, 2003.

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Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, under a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. He was wearing a flight suit. The image was choreographed by his communications staff. The mission was not accomplished. The mission was just beginning. The mission would last another eight years, and in some sense it has not ended yet.

Within months of the fall of Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority, under L. Paul Bremer, issued the orders that would shape the post-invasion period. Order Number 2 dissolved the Iraqi Army, putting four hundred thousand armed men out of work overnight and into the recruitment streams of the insurgency. Order Number 1 banned the Baath Party, eliminating from the new state every administrator, teacher, doctor, and engineer who had been required to hold party membership in order to practice their profession. The country’s institutional memory was deleted. The country’s security forces were turned into the country’s enemies. The vacuum was filled, over the next decade, by sectarian militias, by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and eventually by the Islamic State, which captured Mosul in 2014 with weapons abandoned by an Iraqi army that the United States had built and rebuilt and built again.

The contracts went out. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, received no-bid contracts worth tens of billions of dollars through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root. The contracts covered everything from base construction to oil-field restoration to laundry services for the troops. The contracts were sole-sourced, in the early years, on the grounds that no other firm had the capacity to perform the work at scale. The audits that followed found systematic overbilling, ghost employees, and serial fraud. The men who had drafted the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 had been honest, in their way, about what the strategy was for. It was for access. It was for control. It was for the maintenance of American supremacy in the region from which the world drew its oil. The contracts were the strategy made visible. The contracts went to the firms that the men around the table had spent their careers serving.

The cost, in dollars, has been estimated at three to four trillion when all the long-tail expenses are counted — Veterans Affairs care, interest on the war debt, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that ran on the same authorization, the reconstruction that never reconstructed. The cost, in lives, is the figure that the country has not been able to bring itself to settle. The Iraqi government’s own conservative count is over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. The Lancet‘s 2006 study put the excess mortality at over six hundred thousand. The Iraq Body Count project, which uses only documented media reports, has the number at over two hundred thousand civilian deaths and rising. The number of American military dead is forty-five hundred. The wounded, the traumatized, the families broken — those figures run into the millions on both sides.

The weapons of mass destruction were not found, because they did not exist. The connection to al-Qaeda was not established, because it did not exist. The democratic transformation of the Middle East, which had been the back-up justification once the WMD case collapsed, did not occur. What occurred was the disintegration of Iraq, the rise of Iran as the regional hegemon, the migration of jihadist energy out of Afghanistan and Iraq into Syria and Libya and across the Sahel, and the production of a generation of new enemies whose grievances against the United States were neither imagined nor exaggerated. They were a generation of people whose parents had been killed in the night by men in helmets speaking a language they did not understand. The recruitment material wrote itself.

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I want to come back to George W. Bush, because the piece cannot end without coming back to him.

I do not believe he wanted the war for the oil. I do not believe he sat in the Oval Office and read the Halliburton contracts and licked his lips. I believe he wanted, after September 11, to do something large enough to honor the dead, to protect the country, and to demonstrate that an attack on the United States would be met with a response that no other power on earth could match. I believe he wanted, in some part of himself that had been formed by his faith and by his family, to be the President who liberated a people. I believe he believed Colin Powell when Powell told him the intelligence on the weapons of mass destruction was solid. I believe he believed Cheney when Cheney told him the threat was imminent. I believe he believed the speechwriters when they handed him the sixteen words. I believe he was lied to, repeatedly, by men who had a project predating his presidency by a decade, and that he allowed himself to be lied to because the alternative was to confront the fact that the men around him were not the patriots he had taken them for but operators in service of an agenda older and colder than his own.

There is a name for what was done to him. The name is seizure.

A real attack happened. The real attack was the work of a real network of real conspirators whose names are documented. The decent man at the head of the country wanted to respond, and the response he would have made, on his own, would likely have been the destruction of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the dismantlement of the Taliban government that sheltered them. That war was, by most accounts, supported by ninety percent of the American public and by virtually every government on earth. It was begun on October 7, 2001, and within two months the Taliban had fallen and bin Laden was on the run in the mountains.

What happened next was the seizure. The men who had wanted Iraq for a decade saw, in the catalyzing event they had publicly wished for, the opportunity they had been waiting for. They walked the decent man, step by step, from the war he had said he wanted into the war they had wanted for years. They walked him through the intelligence and they walked him past the contrary intelligence. They walked him to the United Nations and they walked his Secretary of State up to the podium with the vial. They walked him into the Rose Garden and they walked him onto the carrier deck and they walked him into the long unraveling. They walked him out, at the end of two terms, with his approval ratings in the twenties, his party in tatters, his country broken, and an Iraqi state in pieces that would over the next decade produce the Islamic State and the deaths of hundreds of thousands more.

He has, in the years since, done the small kind, private work of a man trying to make a peace with what he was part of. He paints portraits of veterans. He visits Walter Reed. He raises money for the families. He does not speak much in public about the war. There is a humility in him that was not there before. Whether the humility is enough to balance the ledger is not for me to say. I do not believe the ledger can be balanced. I think he knows that too.

⁂

This piece is about the seizure, not the man.

The men who seized the moment did not disappear when Bush left office. They wrote books. They went to AEI and Hudson and the Hoover Institution. They became contributors at Fox News. They mentored the next generation. Robert Kagan and William Kristol and Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard nurtured the writers who would later, when the moment came, retool their analytical apparatus from neoconservatism to postliberalism without ever quite acknowledging that the new project rhymed with the old. Donald Rumsfeld died. Paul Wolfowitz lived to write op-eds about how the Iraq War had been a noble idea undone by bad implementation. The apparatus of think tanks and journals and contracted commentators and rotating Pentagon billets continued, and the men who had been junior staffers in Cheney’s office in 2001 became, twenty years later, the senior writers and policy entrepreneurs of the project that James Pogue would document in 2022 and that I described in the piece I published yesterday.

The line is unbroken. It runs from the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 to the PNAC letter of 1998 to Rebuilding America’s Defenses of 2000 to the Energy Task Force of 2001 to the Office of Special Plans to the sixteen words to the vial at the United Nations to the Mission Accomplished banner to the no-bid Halliburton contracts to the disintegration of Iraq to the rise of the Islamic State to the radicalization of the postliberal right by the failure of the war it had wanted to the J. D. Vance who in 2022 told James Pogue that what he was building was not fascism, it was something different, and that the answer to whether it was fascism was that it would produce a world where his son’s masculinity mattered more than whether it worked for fucking McKinsey.

The men who walked George W. Bush into the war were not the same men who walked J. D. Vance into the Senate. But they share the same shelves. They share the same donor lists. They share the same conferences. They share the same conviction that the American constitutional order is an obstacle to the kind of American power they believe the country needs. They differ only in whether they wish to exercise that power through democratic forms or whether they have decided, after the Iraq disaster and the Trump rupture and the long delegitimization that followed, that the democratic forms must finally be retired.

The 1953 coup was the first seizure. It seized the elected government of Iran for the oil. The 1974 petrodollar handshake was the second seizure. It seized the global currency for the oil. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the third seizure. It seized a real attack on the country to launch a planned war for the oil. The current project — the one Pogue documented, the one Vance speaks for, the one Yarvin writes for, the one Thiel funds — is the fourth seizure. It is the seizure of the American constitutional order itself, on behalf of a coalition of petro-states and the technology firms they have purchased, to install a regime that will guarantee them the next century the way the petrodollar guaranteed them the last one.

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George W. Bush was a decent man. The men around him were not. The men who came after them are not. The decent man was, in the end, the instrument through which a long project advanced one large step.

The instrument can be a decent man. The project does not need every operative to be cruel. The project needs only that the operative at the center of the photograph be the kind of man whose decency makes the cruelty harder to see.

This is the lesson of the war on terror. The terror was real. The response to the terror was hijacked by men who had been waiting for the terror, and the war they launched in the name of the terror was a war they had wanted for a decade for reasons that had nothing to do with the terror.

The conspiracy is the cover story. The cover story this time was they hate us for our freedoms. The cover story this time was weapons of mass destruction. The cover story this time was democracy in the Middle East. The cover story was the language a decent man could be persuaded to speak in front of cameras while the contracts were being written and the maps were being unfolded.

The cover story this time was the war itself.

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I do not know how to close this piece in a way that does not feel inadequate to what it has covered. A million people are dead. A trillion dollars are spent. A region is in ruins. A republic is being walked, by the same apparatus, toward the next seizure.

I keep thinking about the man on the rubble with the bullhorn. He meant it. He was telling the truth in that moment. He was a President responding to a wound. The country was with him. The country would have followed him anywhere he led that week, that month, that year.

And the men around him led him into the wrong war. They led the country into the wrong war. They did it knowing what they were doing. They had the maps in March. They had the plan in 1992. They had the wish for a new Pearl Harbor in print in September of 2000.

The dead deserve more than this piece can give them. The country deserves an accounting that I cannot deliver from where I sit. The most I can do is name what happened, point to the documents, refuse the cover story, and refuse it again the next time the same operators come back with new language and the same map.

The cover story will come back. It always does. The donor lists will be the same. The think tanks will be the same. The men giving interviews will be different but they will have studied under the same advisors. The next catalyzing event will produce the same kind of opportunity, and the same kind of men will be waiting in the same kind of offices to walk the next decent or indecent President through the next plan they have been keeping in the drawer.

The work, when it comes, is to recognize them on sight. To know the shape. To know the names. To know that the cover story is the cover story.

Pogue gave us the names of the present generation. The 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee and Judicial Watch and The New York Times and Vanity Fair gave us the names of the last one. The names are in the documents. The documents are on the internet. The internet still works, for the moment, the way an archive works. Anyone can go and read.

Read.

Then refuse the cover story.

Then look at the man on the rubble with the bullhorn, and the man on the carrier deck under the banner, and the men behind him in suits, and learn to tell the decent man from the operators, and learn to tell the decent man that he is being used.

It is the only protection a republic has against the men who have been waiting in the drawer.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Iran-Contra was a conspiracy. Members of the executive branch of the United States, operating outside the knowledge of Congress and in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, ran a covert weapons-sales program to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a paramilitary force in Nicaragua. The operation involved Oliver North in the National Security Council, William Casey at the CIA, John Poindexter as National Security Advisor, and, at various levels of awareness, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. The conspiracy was uncovered, hearings were held, indictments were filed, several of the conspirators were pardoned. The documentary record is in the National Archives. The conspiracy was real. It happened.

The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh by the Central Intelligence Agency was a conspiracy. The 1974 secret oil-for-security handshake between Henry Kissinger and the Saudi royal family was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was a conspiracy. MK-ULTRA was a conspiracy. The tobacco industry’s coordinated suppression of cancer research for forty years was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Master Settlement Agreement filings. The Sackler family’s strategy to addict tens of millions of Americans to OxyContin was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the bankruptcy filings. The NSA’s PRISM program was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Snowden archive. The Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the CIA assessment that the United States government attempted, briefly, to suppress before having to release.

These are conspiracies. They share a structure. The structure is that an operational coordination existed, the coordination produced an outcome that the participants intended, and the existence and operation of the coordination is supported by the documentary record. They are not theories. They are facts.

Pizzagate was not a conspiracy. The Great Reset was not a conspiracy. The 9/11-as-inside-job theory was not a conspiracy. Chemtrails are not a conspiracy. Lizard people are not a conspiracy. The election was not stolen by Italian satellites controlling Dominion voting machines through Hugo Chávez’s ghost. Adrenochrome harvesting is not a conspiracy. QAnon’s the Storm was not a conspiracy. The moon landing happened. The vaccines were not bioweapons.

These are conspiracy theories. They share a structure. The structure is that an imagined coordination is asserted, the coordination is held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce, and the assertion is unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications. They are not facts. They are theories about facts that do not exist.

The distinction is not subtle. The distinction is the difference between knowing how the world is run and pretending to know how the world is run. The distinction is the difference between Daniel Ellsberg and Alex Jones. The distinction is the difference between James Risen and Steve Bannon. The distinction is the difference between the Panama Papers and Q drops.

But this is not a piece about that distinction.

This is a piece about what the distinction is for. Because the distinction has a function, and the function is what I want to examine.

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In April of 2022, the journalist James Pogue published, in Vanity Fair, a long piece called Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets. Pogue is a serious reporter — a contributing editor at Harper’s, the author of Chosen Country, a writer who has, over the last decade, made it his work to enter rooms most journalists do not enter and to come back with what was said in those rooms. The Pogue piece was the result of months of access. He sat with J. D. Vance during his Senate campaign. He sat with Blake Masters during his. He met with Curtis Yarvin. He attended the National Conservatism conferences. He listened to the men who are now running the second Trump administration describe, in their own words, what they planned to do if they got the power.

What they described, in their own words, was the end of the American republic.

They did not call it that. They called it the postliberal restoration. They called it the American Caesar. They called it the retirement of the administrative state. They called it RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. They called it the founder-king. They called it the national CEO, or what’s called a dictator. They used the words. They used them in front of a reporter. Pogue wrote them down. Vanity Fair published them. The piece has been available on the open internet, behind no paywall stricter than a magazine subscription, for four years.

Vance, asked directly by Pogue why what he was describing was not a fascist takeover, replied that if it worked it would mean that his son would grow up in a world where his masculinity, his support of his family and his community, his love of his community, was more important than whether it worked for fucking McKinsey. Pogue printed the quote. The quote does not deny the framing. The quote answers a question about whether a project is fascist by saying that the project is justified by its hoped-for cultural outcomes. The quote is the kind of quote a careful man does not give a reporter unless the careful man has already made his peace with what is going to be said about him after he gives it.

Yarvin was, of course, the philosophical centerpiece of the Pogue reporting. Yarvin, who has written under the name Mencius Moldbug since 2007, has been arguing for two decades that American democracy is a sham, that the Cathedral — his term for the linked apparatus of universities, prestige media, and federal bureaucracy — runs the country in the name of a managerial-class consensus that has nothing to do with the consent of the governed, and that the solution is the installation of a national CEO with the powers of a dictator, who would retire all government employees, dismantle the constitutional order, and run the country like a startup. Pogue summarizes the position in Yarvin’s own grammar. The position is on the record. Yarvin has spoken it on Tucker Carlson’s show. He has said it on podcasts. He has said it at conferences. He has said it in front of Vance and in front of Thiel and in front of audiences who applauded.

The Pogue piece is therefore not, in any meaningful sense, a piece of investigative journalism that uncovered hidden information. It is a piece of reportorial witnessing that documented information that was already public, because the men who hold the information have not bothered to hide it. They have been describing the project openly for ten years. The project is not a secret. The project is publicly stated, in books — Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Adrian Vermeule’s writing on common-good constitutionalism, the entire postliberal corpus that has been produced by Notre Dame and the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation since 2016 — and the books are on Amazon and the conferences are on YouTube and the Twitter threads are still up.

The conspiracy is in plain sight. The conspirators are giving interviews. The interviews are in Vanity Fair.

And almost no one is reading them.

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This is the part I want to get to.

The argument I have been building across the last four days — the relay piece, the Steyer endorsement, the 1953 coup piece, the Hitchens piece — has been that the apparatus operating against the American republic is a coalition of three things. It is the petrostate-derived sovereign wealth flowing through MGX and HUMAIN and the Qatari Investment Authority into the American AI build-out. It is the American technology class — Thiel, Andreessen, Musk, Sacks — that has spent the past decade engineering the political conditions for the build-out. And it is the political-intellectual class — Vance, Masters, Hawley, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the postliberal theorists, the Yarvin-influenced network-state writers — that is providing the legal-constitutional-philosophical scaffolding for what the technology class and the petrostate money are paying to build.

The apparatus is a habit at the level of the petrodollar — at the level of the institutional reflexes of the CIA, the State Department, the Treasury, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has been running the empire since 1947. That part is a habit. Habits do not require conspiracies. They require only that institutions act on the assumptions that have produced their incentives for long enough that the assumptions become invisible.

But there is, inside that habit, a new thing. The new thing is the project Pogue documented. The new thing is the conscious attempt by a specific group of named men, working with specific named funders, through specific named institutions, to end the American constitutional order and replace it with something else. The new thing is a conspiracy in the operative sense. It is coordinated. It is intentional. It has documents. It has a strategy. It has, as of January 2025, the executive branch.

The thing inside the thing. The conspiracy inside the habit. The active operation inside the passive structure. The 2026 American Caesarist project lives inside the seventy-three-year-old petrodollar apparatus, drinks from the same fountain, draws on the same money, employs the same men. But it has its own agency. It is the apparatus becoming conscious of itself and trying to seize the steering wheel.

It is documented in a Vanity Fair article from April 2022.

And almost no one read it.

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I want to describe what was in front of America for four years and why America did not see it.

The Pogue piece named John Eastman. Eastman was a founding director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. He authored the six-point memo that proposed the procedural mechanism by which Vice President Pence would refuse to certify Biden’s electoral victory on January 6, 2021. He was present at the command center on January 4 and 5. He spoke at the rally on the morning of January 6 before the crowd marched on the Capitol. He has been criminally indicted. He has been disbarred. The conspiracy is documented. It is in the indictment. It is on the public record.

The Pogue piece named Michael Anton. Anton wrote the 2016 Flight 93 Election essay under a pseudonym, the essay that argued that the 2016 election was the cockpit and that conservatives had to charge it or die. Anton served in the first Trump administration as a deputy assistant for strategic communications on the National Security Council. He returned to Claremont after the first administration ended. He has been a featured speaker at the National Conservatism conferences. He has written for American Mind, Claremont’s online journal, articles describing the necessity of a Caesar-like figure to break the administrative state.

The Pogue piece named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin has been the philosophical guru of this network for fifteen years. His ideas — the Cathedral, the national CEO, RAGE, the patchwork, the sovereign corporation, the red pill — have moved from his blog into the speeches of senators, the published books of theorists, the campaign rhetoric of presidential candidates, and the operating assumptions of the men now running the United States government. He has been to dinner with Thiel. He has been on Tucker Carlson. He has been at conferences with Vance. The Vice President of the United States has cited him by name.

The Pogue piece named Peter Thiel. Thiel is the funder. Thiel paid for Vance’s Senate campaign. Thiel paid for Masters’s Senate campaign. Thiel has funded the Edmund Burke Foundation, which puts on the National Conservatism conferences. Thiel has been the patron of Yarvin’s intellectual production for at least a decade. The Thiel network is the financial substrate of the entire postliberal project. The conspiracy is not metaphorical. It is the cap table of a specific set of nonprofits, PACs, and political campaigns, and the cap table is public, and James Pogue wrote it down.

The Pogue piece named the Claremont Institute. Claremont has, since 2016, become the institutional spine of the project. Anton is there. Eastman was there. The American Mind is there. The Sheriffs Fellowship, which the Claremont Institute created in 2021 as what its own fundraising letter described as a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials — that is, a network of conservative county sheriffs trained to resist federal authority during a contested election — is there. The funding for Claremont in the period 2019-2022 included $800,000 from the DeVos family foundation, which also funds the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the James Madison Center for Free Speech. The donor network is documented in IRS 990 filings, which are public, and which several journalists, including the staff at Accountable.US and the Capital Research Center, have walked through and published.

The Pogue piece, in short, is the document. It is not a leak. It is not an exposé. It is a report. It is a description of an active political project, named by name, funded by named funders, expressed in the words of its named participants, intended to produce the end of the American republic as understood since 1787.

The piece was published in Vanity Fair. The piece has not been retracted. The piece has not been disputed by any of the people named in it. The piece exists, and the four years that have passed since it was published have produced exactly the political outcomes that the people in the piece described they would produce if the political conditions permitted.

The piece was not a warning. It was a roll call.

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I want now to say what this has to do with conspiracy theories.

There is a thing the apparatus needs in order to operate a conspiracy in plain sight. It needs the surrounding ecosystem of conspiracy theories — the wrong ones, the imagined ones, the operationally impossible ones — to be loud enough, prolific enough, and ridiculous enough that the act of identifying any conspiracy at all becomes culturally suspect. It needs the term conspiracy theorist to become a synonym for crank. It needs the structural critic and the lizard-people enthusiast to be classified together in the public imagination, so that the structural critic’s accurate description of a real operation can be dismissed on the same terms as the enthusiast’s fictional description of an imagined one.

This is the function of conspiracy theories. They are the cover story for the conspiracies.

I will say this slowly because the formulation matters.

When Pogue published his Vanity Fair piece in April 2022, the dominant conspiracy discourse in American media was about QAnon. The Q drops had run from 2017 to 2020. The Storm was supposed to have come and had not. The pedophile elite was supposed to have been exposed and had not. Pizzagate had become Frazzledrip had become adrenochrome had become the satanic-panic component of the Trump base’s online life. The cable news ecosystem spent enormous resources covering QAnon — its symbology, its converts, its eruption into the January 6 attack — and almost no resources covering what James Pogue had actually documented, which was that a network of named, funded, credentialed men were planning the end of American democracy from offices in Washington and conference rooms in Florida and the offices of a Senate campaign in Cincinnati.

The QAnon coverage was not wrong. QAnon was a real phenomenon producing real harm. But the QAnon coverage was the part of the conspiracy discourse the apparatus was comfortable with. The QAnon people were not going to overthrow the republic. The QAnon people were going to make videos and storm a Capitol building and end up in federal prison. The QAnon people were a pressure valve. They were a way of metabolizing political fear that produced no danger to the actual operation. Some of them died. Some of them were imprisoned. None of them sat in the seat of executive power.

The men James Pogue interviewed are now sitting in the seat of executive power.

This is the function. The conspiracy theorists are the cover for the conspiracy. The lizard people are the cover for the cap table. The chemtrails are the cover for the petrodollar. The Italian satellites are the cover for John Eastman’s six-point memo. The Storm was the cover for the Sheriffs Fellowship. The function of the conspiracy theory in late-imperial American media is to absorb the political energy of conspiracy-detection and burn it on fictional targets so that the real targets remain inadmissible.

This is not a theory I am proposing. This is a description of what has happened. The four years since Pogue’s piece have been a controlled experiment in what happens when a real conspiracy is published in a glossy magazine and the public’s conspiracy-detection apparatus is too busy with imaginary ones to notice. The men named in the piece are now Vice President, Secretary of State, head of the FBI, head of the CIA, head of the Office of Management and Budget, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and head of a dozen subordinate agencies. The Pogue piece was the warning. The warning was filed under interesting magazine journalism. The country went back to arguing about whether Bill Gates put microchips in vaccines.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the most precise example of how the cover-story function works, because he straddles the categories.

He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States. He runs an agency with a budget of $1.7 trillion and operational responsibility for the public health of three hundred and thirty million people. He has, by every measure of the operational record, used the position to dismantle the vaccine schedule, defund vaccine research, reorganize the CDC and FDA to prioritize what he calls medical freedom, and accelerate the spread of measles and pertussis and other diseases the country had functionally eliminated. The measles outbreaks that began in early 2025 have, as of this writing, killed more children than any single year since the late 1980s. The deaths are documented. The CDC’s own data, which his administration has not yet succeeded in suppressing, records them.

He is also a man who has spent forty years building an empire on conspiracy theories — vaccines cause autism, fluoride is mind-control, AIDS is not caused by HIV, the 5G network causes brain damage, the COVID vaccine was a bioweapon developed by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci in a Wuhan laboratory paid for by the World Economic Forum. He has said these things in books, in podcasts, in court filings, in interviews. His audience for these things is enormous. His career was built on these things.

The two facts are connected. He could not have become Secretary of Health and Human Services without the audience the conspiracy theories built him. The audience was the political base. The political base was the leverage that allowed his name to be put before the Senate. The Senate confirmation was the operational acquisition. The forty years of conspiracy theorizing produced the political conditions for the actual conspiracy he is now executing, which is the dismantling of the regulatory state’s capacity to oversee American public health.

The cover story became the operator. The conspiracy theorist became the conspirator. The pattern, taken to its logical conclusion, is RFK Jr. running HHS — a man whose entire career has been spent in the lizard-people version of conspiracy detection now sitting in the room where the actual operational conspiracies of public-health policy are run. He is the conversion of cover into function. He is the apparatus’s most elegant demonstration that the cover stories, run long enough, become the personnel pipeline.

The same pattern, slightly less stark, applies to several of the men Pogue interviewed. Vance was, before he was the postliberal philosopher-king of the Senate Republican caucus, a venture capitalist whose intellectual formation included extensive engagement with Yarvin’s blog. Masters was a podcaster and Thiel Capital employee. Tucker Carlson, who has functioned as the New Right’s primary media venue, has spent his post-Fox career laundering the kind of material that used to be confined to InfoWars into prime-time legitimacy. The men who are now executing the actual conspiracy spent the preceding decade marinating in, and amplifying, the surrounding conspiracy-theory ecosystem. The ecosystem was not separate from them. It was the soil they grew in.

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The structural question, then, is this. What is the conspiracy theorist’s psychic function? Why are people drawn to them? What does the conspiracy theory do for the person who believes it?

I am going to say something that is going to sound condescending, and I do not mean it to. The conspiracy theory provides the feeling of having seen through the apparatus without the cost of having actually seen through the apparatus. It provides the agora-experience — the recognition that the official story is a lie, the thrill of the discovery, the bond with others who have discovered it — without the part of the agora-experience that requires you to read primary sources for ten years and to remain wrong about things and to be excommunicated by your tribe and to die in the wilderness like Hitchens. The conspiracy theory is cheap. The structural critique is expensive. Most people, given the choice, take the cheap thing.

The apparatus has noticed this. The apparatus has, accordingly, built a media ecosystem that produces conspiracy theories at industrial scale. The podcasts run twelve hours a week. The substacks publish daily. The YouTube algorithms recommend the next video. The X feed surfaces the new threads. The supply of conspiracy theories is unlimited because the demand is unlimited because the demand is the demand for cheap agora-experience, which is the most reliable consumer demand in late-imperial life. The apparatus does not have to coordinate the supply. The market handles the coordination. The market handles it because the market has been built to handle it.

This is what Bret Weinstein does. This is what Jordan Peterson does in his recent register. This is what Alex Jones does. This is what RFK Jr. did for forty years. This is what the entire wellness-to-fascism pipeline that Jules Evans and Derek Beres and the Conspirituality podcasters have spent five years documenting does. The pipeline produces the agora-experience cheap. The cheap experience trains the consumer to want it cheaper. The cheap consumer is unable to read Pogue. The unread Pogue is the conspiracy the apparatus needed to bury. The buried Pogue is the country we now live in.

⁂

There is one more thing I want to say before the close, because the relay requires it.

The conspiracy I have been describing — the one Pogue documented in Vanity Fair in April 2022 — does not operate alone. It operates inside the older conspiracy. The older conspiracy is the petrodollar apparatus, the one Kissinger and Fahd shook hands on in 1974, the one the 1953 coup secured the conditions for, the one that has been the operating system of American foreign policy and American currency policy for fifty years. The New Right project, the postliberal restoration, the American Caesarist program, the Yarvin-Vance-Thiel-Anton-Eastman conspiracy — all of it lives inside the older apparatus.

It lives inside it because the older apparatus is what funds it. The petrostate-derived wealth that flows through HUMAIN and MGX and the Qatari Investment Authority into the American AI build-out is the same wealth that, indirectly through the technology fortunes it has helped to produce, ends up in the donor networks that fund Claremont and the Edmund Burke Foundation and the campaigns of Vance and Masters and the rest. The Saudi PIF does not write checks directly to the Claremont Sheriffs Fellowship. The Saudi PIF writes checks to xAI. The xAI valuation enriches Musk. Musk donates to America PAC. America PAC funds the campaign infrastructure that elects Vance. Vance speaks at the launch of Deneen’s Regime Change. Deneen’s Regime Change provides the philosophical grammar for the Yarvin-Anton-Eastman project. The project ends the republic. The republic dies. The petro-AI consolidation is permitted to continue because there is no longer a republic capable of stopping it.

This is the chain. It is not a chain of explicit coordination. It is a chain of aligned incentive. Hitchens would call it a habit. He was right. But the habit, this time, has produced a project. The project is conscious of itself. The project is the conspiracy. The conspiracy lives inside the habit. The habit is the cover story for the conspiracy.

I am putting this in writing because the writing is what we have. James Pogue put it in writing in 2022. The writing has been ignored. I am putting it in writing in 2026, on a Substack with a smaller circulation than Vanity Fair, because the writing is what we have, and the only thing the writing requires is a reader.

⁂

I want to end with a request, not an argument.

Read James Pogue’s piece. It is called Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets. It was published in Vanity Fair on April 20, 2022. It is, by my read, the single most important piece of American journalism produced in the last decade. It described, four years ahead of time, the project that has now installed itself in the executive branch. It named the names. It quoted the quotes. It mapped the donors.

It is also, if you read it carefully, a piece of writing that does what writing about conspiracies is supposed to do, which is to make the conspiracy boring. Pogue does not dress the New Right in gothic robes. He sits at the kitchen table with the men. He has dinner with them. He writes down what they say. The men come across, as Pogue presents them, as recognizable American types — slightly nerdy, slightly aggrieved, well-read, well-funded, certain of themselves, occasionally charming. The genius of the piece is that the men do not seem like monsters. They seem like men. Men who happen to be planning the end of the constitutional order. Men who happen to be funded by other men who have decided that the constitutional order has outlived its usefulness. Men who happen to be writing books and giving interviews and running campaigns and now running the country.

This is what a conspiracy looks like. It does not look like the lizard people. It does not look like the Storm. It does not look like adrenochrome. It looks like a Vanity Fair article from 2022 that we did not read carefully enough.

The cover stories worked. The conspiracy theories did their job. The real conspiracy proceeded.

The relay’s job, now, is the job James Pogue did. Read the cap tables. Sit in the rooms. Write down what is said. Name the names. Refuse the cover stories. Distinguish the documented from the imaginary. Hand the document forward.

Pogue did his work. The piece is in the archive. The archive is open. The reader is what the document needed and has not yet received.

Be the reader.

Then be the next writer.

The pen is on the floor.

Pick it up.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Christopher Hitchens died on the fifteenth of December, 2011, in Houston, of esophageal cancer, at the age of sixty-two. He had been on a book tour for Hitch-22 when the disease announced itself. He spent the eighteen months that followed writing about dying — the essays collected later as Mortality — and refused, in those essays and in every interview, to make a deathbed conversion to anything. He was an atheist when he was diagnosed. He was an atheist when he died. The last two words he is reported to have written, on a piece of paper held up to a friend, were capitalism and downfall.

He was working on the essay when the pen fell.

I want to write about him because the project he was inside is the project these pages have been inside for two years, and because his death in 2011 marks, in retrospect, the last year in which the kind of work he did was being done seriously by anyone with a wide audience. The fourteen years since have seen the rise of an entire ecosystem that has appropriated his posture, his theatrical contrarianism, his willingness to be the most unpopular person in the room, and stripped out the thing that made any of it matter, which was the intellectual cost he paid for it.

He was the last serious contrarian. What came after him is the cargo cult.

⁂

The biography matters because the cost matters, and you cannot see the cost without the biography.

He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth to a naval officer father and a Jewish mother — a fact he did not learn until late in his mother’s life because she had concealed it from the family. He went to the Leys School in Cambridge on scholarship, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read PPE and became a Trotskyist. He was, in the standard British class taxonomy, a clever provincial whose mother had wanted him to escape into the upper-middle-class register, and who escaped further than she had imagined — into the international left, into journalism, into a literary world that ran from Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie in his generation to James Fenton and Ian McEwan in his close circle. He spent two decades as a columnist for The Nation, the American left magazine of record. He wrote for the New Statesman in Britain. He covered war in Cyprus, Lebanon, Argentina, Romania, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia. He was arrested in Czechoslovakia. He was beaten in Beirut. He was poisoned, by his own account, in Bratislava. He went where the witnesses were and watched what happened to them.

He drank like a man who knew the body was on a clock. He smoked through the warnings. He read at a rate his closest friends — including Amis, who is no slouch — described as inhuman. The number of books he had read by the time he died is conservatively in the tens of thousands. He held entire poems in his head. He could recite Auden, Larkin, Yeats, and most of Paradise Lost from memory. He wrote longhand, then typed, with the speed of a man who was always slightly behind a deadline he had set himself.

This is the substrate. The cost of his contrarianism was extracted from a person who had built, over forty years of disciplined reading and field reporting, the equipment that contrarianism actually requires. He was not a contrarian because he had a podcast. He was a contrarian because he had, by the time he sat down to write, more information about the subject than the people he was disagreeing with. The contrarianism was the conclusion. The reading was the work.

⁂

There are two events in his life that the entire shape of his project turns on.

The first was 1989. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses on February 14 of that year. The British political class, the British literary class, and a significant portion of the British left treated the fatwa as a regrettable cultural misunderstanding that Rushdie had to some degree provoked. Hitchens treated it as what it was: a totalitarian death sentence issued by a theocratic state against a novelist for the contents of a novel. He did not equivocate. He did not contextualize. He took Rushdie into his home for periods of the years that followed, he campaigned publicly for the Iranian regime’s isolation, and he watched, in real time, his own political tribe — the British left he had been a part of since Oxford — discover that it was prepared to abandon a writer to murder rather than offend a constituency it had decided to court.

The Rushdie fatwa was Hitchens’s first encounter with the priestly class as a structural force. He had encountered priests as individuals all his life, but the fatwa was the moment he understood that the apparatus of theocratic power and the apparatus of leftist accommodation could fuse, that they would fuse whenever doing so suited the political calculations of the moment, and that the witness — Rushdie, in that case — would be the cost. It is the through-line of every position he took for the next twenty-two years. The Bosnian Muslims facing Milošević. The Iraqi Kurds facing Saddam. The Afghans facing the Taliban. The atheist case in God Is Not Great. The defense of Rushdie was the template.

The second event was September 11, 2001. He was in the air on the morning of the attacks, on a flight back from somewhere — he wrote about it in Hitch-22 but the specifics never landed in my head — and what happened to him in the days afterward was that he watched, again, his own political tribe insist that the attacks were the consequence of American foreign policy, that they were the chickens coming home to roost, that the appropriate response was a kind of self-flagellating examination of imperial sin. He wrote a column in The Nation breaking with this position. He used the word Islamo-fascism in a way that made his colleagues recoil. He insisted that what had attacked New York was a totalitarian movement with a theological grammar, that it had to be named and opposed, and that the Left’s reflexive anti-Americanism was, in this case, what Trotskyists had once called objectively reactionary — it was running cover for the worst kind of theocrats the twentieth century had produced.

He resigned from The Nation in 2002. The break was permanent. He spent the next decade describing himself as a former-Trotskyist, then a former-socialist, then — by the very end — a small-l liberal in the classical sense. He never described himself as a conservative. He never voted Republican. He despised Reagan personally, despised Thatcher personally, and never retracted either contempt. But he had crossed a line his tribe could not forgive, and they did not forgive him.

⁂

He was wrong about the Iraq War. Not wrong in the way the apparatus would later concede — that the war had been mismanaged, that the WMD intelligence had been bad, that the Coalition Provisional Authority had blundered. He was wrong in the deeper way. He had convinced himself that the United States, under the second Bush administration, was the available instrument for the project he believed in — the destruction of Baathist totalitarianism in Iraq, the liberation of the Kurds, the planting of a democratic precedent in the Arab world. He was wrong because the United States, as the apparatus that had run the 1953 coup and the 1974 petrodollar deal, was never going to use the invasion of Iraq for the purposes he hoped. The apparatus used the invasion for the apparatus’s purposes, which were to install a friendly regime, control the oil flow, demonstrate the post-Cold-War military hegemony, and enrich the contractor class. The half-million dead Iraqis were the cost the apparatus was willing to pay. Hitchens believed they were the cost of liberation. He was wrong.

He never fully recanted. He defended the war until his death, even as he criticized its execution. This is the hardest thing about him for me, and I will not pretend otherwise. The piece you are reading is not a hagiography. He was wrong. He was wrong loudly. He was wrong in a way that had real consequences for real people, including the people he had said he was trying to defend.

And I want to say something the present moment cannot say, because the present moment has lost the vocabulary to say it. He was wrong, and his being wrong is exactly what makes him different from the men who came after him and took his posture without his cost.

He was wrong, and he paid the price of being wrong. He lost his publication. He lost half his audience. He lost most of his old political friendships. He went, in the space of three years, from being a fixture of the Western left to being a man who, when his name came up at a dinner party of his former allies, was sometimes spat at. He did not go to the right. The right would have welcomed him as a prize defector and paid him accordingly. He refused. He stayed where he was — a leftist who had supported the war, a man without a tribe, a writer working without a constituency. He paid that cost for ten years. He paid it until the cancer killed him.

The point is not that being wrong is admirable. The point is that being wrong and refusing to switch sides for safety or money is what makes someone a witness rather than a careerist. Hitchens chose the price. The men who came after him have chosen the prize.

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The intellectual dark web was a phrase coined, half-jokingly, by Eric Weinstein in 2018, to describe a loose grouping that included his brother Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, and a rotating supporting cast. The premise was that these were thinkers who had been driven from polite progressive discourse by the rigidity of identity politics on the cultural left, and that they had built, through podcasts and Substacks and YouTube channels, a parallel intellectual ecosystem in which the conversations that could no longer be had in legacy media could continue.

The premise was half true and half a marketing position. The cultural left in the late 2010s had developed real pathologies of speech-policing, and some of the IDW figures had real complaints about being shut out of academic and journalistic positions for views that, a decade earlier, would have been unremarkable. I am not interested, in this piece, in defending the cultural-left pathologies that the IDW was reacting against. I am interested in what the IDW did with the position it had created for itself.

What it did was take Christopher Hitchens’s posture — the willingness to disagree with one’s tribe, the contempt for sacred cows, the theatrical relish of saying the unsayable — and strip out the things that had made Hitchens’s version of the posture meaningful. The reading. The reporting. The languages. The deep historical grounding. The decades of paying personal costs for the positions taken. The willingness to remain in a place of intellectual difficulty rather than to monetize the position by joining a more profitable tribe.

Sam Harris is the closest of them to Hitchens in raw aptitude. He is intelligent. He is well-read in cognitive science and Buddhist meditation traditions. His critique of religious literalism, in The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, was a serious continuation of the kind of work Hitchens did in God Is Not Great. But Harris’s response to the political crisis of the last decade has been, with the partial exception of his treatment of Trump in the 2016-2020 period, a kind of slow disengagement from the political into the parametric. He has retreated into the metaphysics of consciousness, the philosophy of free will, the technicalities of meditation practice. The world burns; he discusses whether the self is real. He is a serious man making a non-serious choice about where to spend his seriousness. Hitchens spent his seriousness on the fire.

Bret Weinstein went further. He started as an evolutionary biologist with a real grievance against Evergreen State College’s struggle sessions in 2017. By 2020 he was promoting ivermectin against the COVID consensus. By 2022 he was in a steady decline into the conspiracist ecosystem, talking about the Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, mRNA vaccines as bioweapons. His brother Eric followed a similar arc into number-mysticism and the Portal and gnomic Tweet threads about how the apparatus would not let him publish his physics theory. Both Weinsteins took the contrarian posture and ran it through a paranoid filter that Hitchens, who had reported from inside actual conspiracies in actual police states, would have recognized as the symptom of a man who had never seen one.

Bari Weiss is the most useful contrast because she invokes Hitchens explicitly. She left The New York Times in 2020 with a public resignation letter that channeled the spirit of his break with The Nation, founded The Free Press, and has positioned herself as a defender of liberal values against progressive excess. Some of her work is real journalism. Some of it is the careful production of a brand. The difference between her exit and Hitchens’s is that her exit launched a media company that has, in five years, become a fixture of the donor-class commentary world, funded by the same people who fund the rest of the rentier coalition’s intellectual production. She did not go into the wilderness. She went into a different room of the apparatus and rebranded the room. Hitchens went into the wilderness and stayed there until he died.

Douglas Murray is the closest among them to Hitchens in literary style and in willingness to write at book length. He is also, by my reading, the most explicit example of what happens when you take Hitchens’s posture and run it through a different politics. Murray’s case against Islamism in The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West is an extension of the Rushdie-fatwa instinct, but it has, over time, drifted into a register that Hitchens himself would have recognized as the right-wing-populist appropriation of the secular-liberal critique. Murray has been a fixture on the same podcast circuit as the Weinsteins. He has appeared on Tucker Carlson. He has, increasingly, treated the populist right as a tactical ally rather than a category of opponent. Hitchens, in 2003, was willing to be on the same side as the Bush administration for the duration of one war, and he wrote about that decision with discomfort for the rest of his life. Murray has crossed the line Hitchens would not have crossed and shows no discomfort.

Joe Rogan is not a thinker. He is a microphone with affability. His role in this ecosystem is to be the venue. He has hosted everyone in the IDW universe and has, by his own admission, no settled political views beyond the suspicion that the apparatus is lying to him. He represents the form of the IDW without any content. The form is what the IDW has actually built. The form is a podcast, three hours long, in which a man with read intelligence and another man with read intelligence have a conversation in which they congratulate each other for being willing to have the conversation. The form is the product. The form is what made the IDW profitable. The form is also the form that has nothing to do with Hitchens.

Hitchens did not do podcasts. He did the Charlie Rose show, he did Real Time, he debated in person. The debates were unrehearsed and adversarial. He came in knowing more than the other person and prepared to humiliate them with the reading they had not done. The podcast as a form was designed, in the IDW era, to do the opposite. The podcast as a form is designed to be a friendly conversation between people who agree about the meta-point, even when they disagree about the object-level point, and the meta-point is always we are the people willing to have the conversation that the mainstream will not permit. This is the cargo-cult version of Hitchens. The posture is preserved. The price is not paid. The reading is not done. The willingness to be wrong about Iraq for ten years, alone, without a tribe, without a paycheck from the right that would have welcomed you, is not in evidence.

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The contrarianism Hitchens practiced was a function of his commitment to a substrate that he believed was real and that he believed the apparatus, in any political configuration, was always trying to obscure. The substrate, for him, was the open society in the Popperian-Orwellian sense — the society in which authority must justify itself to reason, in which the citizen is sovereign, in which no priest or commissar or chairman gets to declare a question closed. Contrarianism was the byproduct of his commitment to that substrate. When his own tribe abandoned the substrate, he abandoned the tribe. He did not develop a brand around being the kind of person who abandons tribes.

The contrarianism the IDW practices is a brand divorced from the substrate. The brand consists of being the kind of person who abandons the tribe, regardless of whether the tribe has done anything that warrants abandonment in that case, because the abandonment is the product. When the IDW’s audience is the donor class and the audience wants to hear that progressive academics are absurd, the IDW provides that. When the audience wants to hear that the COVID consensus was a conspiracy, the IDW provides that. When the audience wants to hear that the regulators of artificial intelligence are the Antichrist, several of them provide that as well. The product is the abandonment. The abandonment serves the audience. The audience pays. The substrate is irrelevant.

This is the difference. This is the entire difference. Hitchens paid to remain a witness. The IDW gets paid to perform the part.

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What Hitchens would have written about this moment is, I think, knowable, because he wrote the templates for it across forty years.

He would have written about the petro-AI alliance the way he wrote about Kissinger’s secret diplomacy in The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He would have used the same prosecutorial method. The book is a model. It lays out the deal, names the names, follows the money, refuses the deference the apparatus demands its journalists pay to the elder statesmen of foreign policy. The Hitchens of 2026 would have done to Sheikh Tahnoon and Mohammed bin Salman and the architects of MGX and Stargate and HUMAIN what the Hitchens of 2001 did to Kissinger. He would have named the deal and named the parties and refused to pretend that the financialization of the American AI build-out by petrostate sovereign wealth was a market transaction rather than a transfer of leverage.

He would have written about Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures the way he wrote about Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position. The book is a model. It strips a religious figure of the protective coating the culture wants to wrap them in and demands that the actual record be examined. The actual record is not the marketing material. The Hitchens of 2026 would have read every available transcript of Thiel’s Palazzo Orsini Taverna lectures, every interview, every YouTube clip, and he would have written the book that names the apparatus the lectures serve. He would have used the word fascism and he would have used it correctly. He would have been called all the names he was called when he supported Iraq, by the people who now claim to be his ideological heirs, and he would not have cared.

He would have written about the appropriation of Reagan and Thatcher by the rentier coalition the way he wrote about Orwell’s appropriation by the Cold War right in Why Orwell Matters. The book is a model. It rescues a witness from the people who have decided to claim him posthumously and returns him to the political project he actually served. The Hitchens of 2026 would have done the same recovery work I just attempted on Reagan and Thatcher, except he would have done it with more rigor and more wit and more Larkin-quotation and he would have done it for a wider audience.

He would have written about Magnifica Humanitas with the kind of attention he reserved for the few religious figures he respected — Bonhoeffer, the Buddhist monks who burned themselves in protest of the Vietnam War, the Jesuits who hid Jews in Lyon — and he would have noted, with what he would have called grudging admiration, that an American pope had said something the secular liberal apparatus had failed to say about artificial intelligence and human dignity. He would have written it as an atheist. He would not have softened the atheism. He would simply have noted, as he noted in Mortality, that the priestly class includes some of the worst people who have ever lived and some of the best, and that the difference between them is not the institution but the conscience.

He would have, in other words, been doing what these pages have been trying to do. He would have been better at it. He is not here. The pen fell from his hand on December 15, 2011.

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I read Hitchens in my twenties. I read him through the Iraq War period when I was not yet politically formed enough to understand that he was wrong. I read him afterward, when I was politically formed enough to see that he was wrong, and I had to make a decision about whether the wrongness disqualified the rest of the work. I decided it did not. I have spent twenty years walking back through that decision and I have not changed it.

He was wrong about Iraq. He was right about Rushdie. He was right about Mother Teresa. He was right about Kissinger. He was right about Mark Twain and George Orwell and Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson and the entire English literary canon he had eaten and metabolized. He was right that the priestly class, in every grammar — Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Stalinist, Catholic, Mormon — is the apparatus that converts the substrate of human freedom into rent. He was right that the witnesses pay for the right to remain witnesses and that the cost is the part that cannot be skipped. He was right that the cost is exactly what makes the witness’s testimony worth listening to.

The men who came after him took the testimony without the cost. The testimony, in their hands, became a content category. The content category became a podcast empire. The podcast empire became a donor-funded media operation. The media operation became a node in the rentier coalition’s intellectual production. The witnesses, in their hands, became vestments. The same operation the early church ran on Jesus. The same operation the rentier coalition is running on Reagan and Thatcher. The same operation the apparatus has been running on every witness since the substrate first broke through.

Hitchens saw the operation. He named it. He wrote against it for forty years.

He was the last serious contrarian because he understood that contrarianism without commitment to a substrate is just career management. The career management came after him. The substrate-commitment died with him.

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Capitalism. Downfall.

The last two words on the piece of paper. He held it up to Steve Wasserman, his friend. The handwriting was illegible. He said, What’s the use?

Then he tried again.

The two words that came out — the ones that could be read — were the title of the unfinished essay. He was working on a piece about the contradictions inside the system that had given him his audience and his platform and his readership and his fortune, the system whose contradictions he had spent his life refusing to let go unexamined.

The pen fell. The piece was not finished.

We are inside the system. We are inside the petro-AI consolidation, the rentier coalition, the appropriation operation, the seventy-third year of the 1953 coup. The contradictions are sharper than they have ever been. The witnesses are fewer than they have ever been. The priestly class wears Hitchens’s clothes without his soul. The podcasters perform his theatrics without his price.

He is not here. The pen is on the floor.

Someone has to pick it up.

The relay does not stop because a witness dies. The relay stops only when no one is willing to pay the cost of being the next witness. Hitchens paid his cost. He was the last serious contrarian in the public ecosystem we are inside. The men who came after him are not his heirs. They are the priestly class he spent his life writing against, wearing his vestments, performing his liturgy, collecting the rent.

The pen is on the floor.

Pick it up.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In August of 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency and Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran because he had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mohammad Mossadegh wanted Iranian oil to belong to Iranians. The British had taken it in 1908, kept it in 1911, kept it in 1921, kept it in 1933, kept it in 1941, kept it in 1951, and would not give it up in 1953. The Americans, fearing that an independent Iran would drift to the Soviets or, worse, set a precedent that oil belongs to the countries it is under, sent Kermit Roosevelt to Tehran with a satchel of cash. The CIA paid newspapers to lie about Mossadegh. The CIA paid clerics to denounce him. The CIA paid demonstrators to fill the streets and chant against him. On August 19, after a week of staged chaos, the army moved. Mossadegh was arrested, tried for treason, sentenced to three years in prison, and lived the rest of his life under house arrest. The Shah, who had fled the country in panic five days earlier, was flown back to Tehran by the apparatus that had just restored him.

The coup was not about communism. The coup was about oil. The Cold War frame was the cover story the apparatus needed to sell the operation to the American public and to itself. The actual transaction was simpler. The British wanted the oil back. The Americans wanted a stable client. Iranian democracy was the obstacle. So Iranian democracy was removed.

The CIA acknowledged its role formally in 2013, sixty years later, in documents released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act. The military coup, one of the internal histories says, was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy. The agency that has spent seventy years describing itself as a defender of the free world wrote down, in its own files, that it overthrew an elected government to take a country’s oil.

This is the founding act of the modern American oil empire. It is also the founding act of the modern American intelligence apparatus. The two are the same act. And the apparatus that ran the operation in 1953 is the apparatus that bombed Iran on February 28, 2026, seventy-three years later, while the same fight over the same oil under the same ground continues.

The 1953 coup never ended. It is the operating system the United States has been running ever since.

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In 1974, twenty-one years after the coup, Henry Kissinger went to Saudi Arabia and made a deal with Prince Fahd. The deal had no public document. The deal had no Senate ratification. The deal was a handshake and a series of follow-on agreements that were classified for decades. The substance of the deal was this. The Saudis would price all oil sales in United States dollars. The Saudis would recycle the dollars they received from oil sales back into United States Treasury securities. The United States would, in exchange, guarantee the security of the House of Saud against all comers, foreign and domestic, by every means including military force.

This is the petrodollar. It is the second founding act of the modern American empire, and it is the direct continuation of the first. The 1953 coup secured the oil. The 1974 deal secured the currency the oil would be priced in. Every nation on earth that wanted to buy oil — which is to say every industrialized nation — had to first acquire dollars. The demand for dollars became permanent and global, not because of the strength of the American economy, but because of the structure of the oil market. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency not on the merits of American productivity but because Henry Kissinger and Prince Fahd shook hands in 1974.

The deal had consequences the architects could not have fully anticipated. The dollars the Saudis recycled into Treasuries financed American deficits for fifty years. The American defense umbrella over the Gulf became permanent. The political economy of the United States bent itself around the maintenance of the deal. Five presidencies in a row, from Carter to Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush, treated the security of the House of Saud as identical to the national interest. Every administration sold the Saudis more weapons. Every administration looked away from the human rights abuses, the funding of jihadi networks, the export of Wahhabism, the 1996 Khobar bombing, the September 11 hijackers, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The deal was the deal. The petrodollar was the firewall.

Mossadegh had wanted Iranian oil to belong to Iranians. The petrodollar made sure that no oil, anywhere, belonged to the country it came out of. The oil belonged to the dollar, and the dollar belonged to the apparatus.

This is the structure. This is what the apparatus did between 1953 and 1974, and it is what the apparatus has been doing ever since. Every regime change operation since 1953, every coup, every sanctions regime, every drone strike, every aircraft carrier moved into the Strait of Hormuz, has been a maintenance operation on the original transaction. The coup never ended because the deal never ended. The deal never ended because the dollar’s status as reserve currency depended on it. The dollar’s status depended on it because the American empire depended on it.

When Kissinger died in November of 2023 at the age of one hundred, the obituaries treated him as a foreign policy giant whose realism shaped the modern world. The obituaries were correct about the second part. They were wrong about the first. He was not a realist. He was a bag man. He carried the suitcase from the apparatus to the desert and brought back the receipt. The realism was the cover story. The deal was the deal.

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In February of 2026 the Trump administration bombed Iran.

The bombing was framed as a response to Iranian nuclear development. The bombing was framed as a defense of Israel. The bombing was framed as a deterrent against an Iranian strike on American interests. The bombing was framed in every way except the actual way, which is that Iran had begun, in the eighteen months prior, to price an increasing share of its oil exports in yuan and rubles, and to settle transactions outside the dollar-clearing system. The petrodollar was beginning to fray, and Iran was the country most aggressively pulling the threads.

The administration did not say this. The administration could not say this. To say this would be to admit that the United States bombs countries to protect a currency arrangement Henry Kissinger made in 1974. So the administration said other things. The Iranians were close to a bomb. The Iranians had attacked an American base. The Iranians were on the verge of doing something that justified what we were already going to do.

The pattern is exact. In 1953 the cover story was that Mossadegh was drifting to communism. In 2026 the cover story is that the Islamic Republic is drifting to nuclear weapons. In 1953 the actual reason was oil. In 2026 the actual reason is oil. The apparatus that ran the operation in 1953 is the apparatus that ran the operation in 2026, and the apparatus has not learned anything, and the apparatus has not given anything back, and the apparatus has not stopped because the apparatus cannot stop. The deal is the deal. The structure is the structure. The 1953 coup never ended because the apparatus that ran it never ended.

The Iranian people, watching American bombs fall on their cities in February of 2026, were watching the seventy-third year of the same operation. The grandchildren of the Iranians who voted for Mossadegh in 1951 were dying under the same bombs the apparatus had been preparing to drop since 1953. The Mossadegh family is still in Iran. The Shah’s family is in exile. The CIA is still the CIA. The deal is still the deal.

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The petrodollar is dying. This is the thing everyone in the apparatus knows and almost no one in the public is being told.

The Saudis have begun, since 2023, to accept yuan for oil sales to China. The BRICS bloc has been building a parallel settlement system. The Russians, sanctioned out of the dollar system in 2022, have been demonstrating to every country watching that the dollar is a weapon that can be turned against you, and that having an alternative is no longer a luxury. The Indians are paying for Russian oil in rupees. The Brazilians are settling China trade in yuan. The dollar’s share of global reserves has fallen from seventy-three percent in 2001 to under fifty-eight percent in 2025. The petrodollar is not collapsing. It is leaking. The leak is structural. The leak cannot be patched by the means available to the apparatus, because the means available to the apparatus are the means that caused the leak.

The apparatus has known this for at least a decade. The response has been to find a new commodity to anchor the dollar’s global demand. Oil was the first anchor. Computation may be the second.

This is where the AI build-out comes in. This is the part of the story that does not appear in any policy paper, any congressional hearing, any Wall Street Journal explainer, but that the apparatus is openly executing in plain sight if you know what you are looking at.

In November of 2025 at the United States-Saudi Investment Forum, HUMAIN — the artificial intelligence company wholly owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, created by Mohammed bin Salman — signed a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI to co-develop more than five hundred megawatts of data center capacity inside Saudi Arabia, with the deployment of Grok models across the kingdom. In January of 2026, Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s MGX anchored xAI’s twenty-billion-dollar Series E. In February of 2026, HUMAIN invested three billion dollars directly into xAI just before its merger with SpaceX into a combined entity valued at approximately one and a quarter trillion dollars. The Saudi stake converted into SpaceX equity. The Saudis now own a significant minority of the largest private aerospace and AI company in human history.

In October of 2025, MGX joined a six-and-a-half-billion-dollar secondary share sale in OpenAI, valuing the company at five hundred billion dollars. MGX is a partner in Stargate, the five-hundred-billion-dollar joint venture announced by the Trump administration with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build American AI infrastructure. MGX is an anchor in the AI Infrastructure Partnership with BlackRock and Microsoft, a one-hundred-billion-dollar commitment primarily to United States AI infrastructure. Microsoft itself has put one and a half billion dollars into G42, MGX’s parent.

In September of 2025, Qatar Investment Authority anchored the thirteen-billion-dollar funding round that valued Anthropic at one hundred eighty-three billion dollars. Dario Amodei had previously refused Middle Eastern money on geopolitical grounds. He took the money.

This is not opportunism. This is not a series of unrelated transactions. This is the apparatus laying the second anchor.

The pattern is exact and visible. Saudi sovereign wealth, Emirati sovereign wealth, Qatari sovereign wealth — the three principal beneficiaries of the petrodollar — are being routed into the American AI build-out at the level of every major frontier-model lab, every major data-center consortium, every major compute infrastructure play. The same dollars that the Saudis recycled into Treasury securities for fifty years are now being recycled into NVIDIA chips, hyperscaler data centers, and the equity of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The dollar’s anchor in oil is being replaced, in real time, with a dollar anchor in computation. The petro-dollar is becoming the petro-AI.

The argument the apparatus would make, if forced to articulate it, would run like this. Artificial intelligence is the next general-purpose technology. Whoever controls the leading frontier models, the leading inference infrastructure, and the leading compute supply chain controls the commanding heights of the twenty-first-century economy. The dollar’s role as reserve currency depends on the United States being the indispensable economic actor in the world. If the United States is the indispensable AI actor, the dollar remains the currency of indispensability. If the petrostates that have been recycling dollars into Treasuries can be persuaded to recycle dollars into American AI equity instead, the petrodollar’s death is converted into the petro-AI’s birth without an interregnum. The empire continues. The deal continues. The 1953 coup, structurally, continues.

This is the play. It is being executed in plain sight. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the chairman of MGX and the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor, is now one of the most consequential investors in American technology because the apparatus that wrote the petrodollar in 1974 has decided he gets to be one. Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and was sanctioned by the Biden administration’s report on the killing, is now, through HUMAIN, a significant shareholder in the SpaceX-xAI combined entity, because the apparatus has decided that he gets to be one. Qatar, which has spent twenty years funding both the Muslim Brotherhood and the American think-tank ecosystem simultaneously, is now an anchor investor in Anthropic and xAI, because the apparatus has decided.

The decision is the decision. The structure is the structure. The 1953 coup never ended.

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I want to name what is being purchased.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund did not invest three billion dollars in xAI because it admires Elon Musk. The Saudi Public Investment Fund invested three billion dollars in xAI because Elon Musk is the United States Special Government Employee who, until his exit in 2025, ran a parallel administration inside the Trump White House through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, who personally owns the largest commercial satellite constellation in human history through Starlink, who owns the largest social media platform of the American political class through X, who runs the largest American electric vehicle company through Tesla, who has just acquired the largest American AI company through the xAI-SpaceX merger, and who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he is willing to use all of these instruments to support the political objectives of the people who help him.

What the Saudis bought, for three billion dollars, is leverage on the man who, more than any other private individual on earth, can move American politics, American information, American satellites, and American compute. This is not an investment. This is a tribute. The kingdom is paying the warlord.

The Qatari Investment Authority did not anchor Anthropic’s thirteen-billion-dollar round because it loves Claude. The Qatari Investment Authority anchored the round because Anthropic is the leading frontier-AI lab making the case for safety-constrained development, which means Anthropic is the leading frontier-AI lab whose models are most likely to be the ones that Western governments and Western enterprises will be allowed to use under regulatory regimes that may yet emerge. The Qataris bought a position in the lab most likely to remain inside the regulatory permission set. They bought legitimacy futures.

The Emiratis did not put MGX into Stargate because they believe in Larry Ellison’s vision. The Emiratis put MGX into Stargate because Stargate is the official infrastructure program of the Trump administration’s AI policy, and Sheikh Tahnoon, who runs the kingdom’s intelligence services and its AI investments, understood that being inside Stargate means being inside the room where the American government’s AI procurement decisions are made for the next decade.

The Saudis bought Musk. The Qataris bought Anthropic. The Emiratis bought the Trump administration’s AI program. Each of these is a different facet of the same purchase, which is a structural stake in the apparatus that is succeeding the petrodollar.

And in exchange, the apparatus has agreed — not in any document but in the unspoken terms that have always governed these relationships — to overlook everything. To overlook Khashoggi. To overlook Yemen. To overlook the Qatari funding of Hamas. To overlook the Emirati funding of the RSF in Sudan. To overlook the human rights records that the State Department has compiled in its own annual reports for forty years. The deal is the deal. The dollar must continue. The empire must continue. The 1953 coup must continue.

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There is a name for this kind of arrangement. The name is rentier coalition.

A rentier coalition is what you get when the dominant economic interest in a polity is the collection of rent rather than the production of goods. In a rentier economy, the political class becomes the apparatus that protects the rent stream. The rent stream becomes the master, and the political class becomes the servant. The citizens become the marks. This is how the Gulf monarchies have operated since the discovery of oil. It is also, increasingly, how the United States has begun to operate, with technology platforms in the role of oil wells and the algorithmic economy in the role of the rent stream.

The American AI build-out is being financed by the Gulf because the Gulf already knows how rentier economies work. The Gulf invented the modern version. The Gulf has been a rentier economy for sixty years. The Gulf understands that the political function of the rentier class is to maintain the apparatus that collects the rent, and that the political function of the rent-collecting apparatus is to make sure no one inside the polity ever organizes a political project that would redirect the rent. The Gulf is teaching the American technology class how to be the Gulf.

This is what Marc Andreessen has been writing about for two years when he writes about the founder-king and the network state and the exit from democratic legitimacy. This is what Curtis Yarvin has been writing about for fifteen years when he writes about Fnargl and the patchwork and the sovereign corporation. This is what Peter Thiel has been writing about for twenty-five years when he writes about competition is for losers and technology against politics and, most recently, that the regulators of artificial intelligence are the Antichrist. These men are not philosophers. They are spokesmen for a rentier coalition. The coalition is the Gulf money plus the American technology class plus the political class the technology class has purchased. The coalition’s program is to convert the American republic into a permanent rentier polity in which the citizens are the marks and the rent stream — soon to be the AI compute monopoly — is the master.

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I want to say something about the names this coalition has been wearing.

The rentier coalition has, for thirty years, claimed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as its founding ancestors. The Reagan Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Mont Pelerin Society in its current form, the Adam Smith Institute in its current form, the Heritage successor outfits, the network of think tanks and policy shops and PACs that run conservative politics on both sides of the Atlantic — all of them invoke Reagan and Thatcher as the saints of the present arrangement. The men who fled the country in May of 2026 to avoid a wealth tax, who called the American pope the Antichrist, who built the petro-AI alliance with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Doha, do so in the names of Reagan and Thatcher. The coalition wears these names like vestments.

The names do not belong to the coalition.

Ronald Reagan was, by every measure of his actual biography, a New Deal Democrat who came to classical liberalism through the experience of watching the labor movement he had served as Screen Actors Guild president be infiltrated by Stalinists and through reading Hayek and Friedman with the seriousness of a convert. He was the son of a shoe salesman and a Disciples of Christ mother. He believed, with what the record shows was complete sincerity, that the open society was the moral inheritance of the Enlightenment and that the Soviet Union was the totalitarian negation of that inheritance. His farewell address — the shining-city address, the one that ends with the doors open and the people walking toward the light — is the most explicit statement of classical liberalism any American president has given since Jefferson. Read it. He is not arguing for the rentier coalition. He is arguing for the agora.

Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a Methodist grocer in Grantham. She was formed by ration books, by the chapel, by Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom which she read at Oxford and never put down, by Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies which she invoked by name in her speeches. She came to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975 against a Britain whose postwar consensus had produced stagnation, inflation, industrial strangulation, and the genuine collapse of the conditions for civic freedom. She was responding to a real failure of market communism — the term is exact, the postwar British state had nationalized the means of production in ways that resembled what the Eastern Bloc had done with less violence and similar incompetence. Her answer was classical-liberal. Sound money, the rule of law, private property, civil society, and the chapel virtues she had grown up inside. She believed she was defending the open society against a softer version of what Reagan was defending it against on the other side of the ocean. She was not wrong about what she was defending against. She was right about the diagnosis. The treatment was the treatment of someone who believed, sincerely, in the agora.

Both of them were surrounded, from the first day of their respective ascents, by people who did not share their answer. The corporate raiders of the eighties did not share Reagan’s answer. Michael Milken did not share Reagan’s answer. The financial-engineering class that converted American manufacturing into private-equity rent did not share Reagan’s answer. The men who built the offshore-trust networks that drained the productive base into Cayman shell companies did not share Reagan’s answer. They used his language. They invoked his liberty rhetoric. They campaigned in his name. They were not the thing he was defending. They were the thing he would have recognized, had he been allowed to see it clearly at the end, as the soft version of what he had spent his life trying to keep out.

Thatcher’s situation was identical. The City of London financial class that grew into the dominant force in British politics under her successors did not share her answer. The arms dealers and the Russian oligarchs and the Saudi princes who began parking their money in London property after 1986 did not share her answer. The Conservative Party that, after her ouster in 1990, became the party of the hedge fund manager rather than the party of the small-business owner did not share her answer. They wore her clothes. They were not her project. They were the thing her project, properly executed, would have prevented.

Reagan died in 2004. Thatcher died in 2013. The appropriation accelerated after the bodies were cold. The Reagan Library now hosts the same managerial-class accumulators Reagan distrusted his whole career. The Thatcher Foundation now hosts the network-state intellectuals who would have horrified her. The names are the vestments. The bodies inside the vestments are not the people whose names are on them.

The relay has seen this operation before. It is the oldest move in the operation’s playbook.

The carpenter from Nazareth threw the money changers out of the temple in approximately 30 of the Common Era. He was killed by the apparatus shortly afterward. Three hundred years later, the Roman Empire that had killed him made his name the official name of the imperial cult. The largest slave economy on earth conducted its slave trade under the cross. The most violent military apparatus in the ancient world marched under the labarum. The carpenter who said the kingdom is among you and inside you, who blessed the poor and cursed the rich, who said it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of God, became the patron saint of the wealthiest and most extractive empire human civilization had yet produced. The appropriation was total. The witness was converted into a vestment.

This is the operation. This is what is being done to Reagan and Thatcher right now, in real time, by the rentier coalition that has spent forty years wearing their language while building the opposite of what they intended. The men who flew to Buenos Aires to escape a wealth tax invoke Reagan. The men who built the petro-AI alliance with the House of Saud invoke Thatcher. The neoreactionary writers who argue for the dissolution of democratic legitimacy invoke both. The appropriation is total. The witnesses are being converted into vestments.

The relay refuses the appropriation. The carpenter is not the empire’s. Reagan is not the coalition’s. Thatcher is not the coalition’s. The shining city is not the rent stream. The open society is not the network state. The freedom Reagan invoked is the freedom 2 Corinthians 3:17 names — the Spirit lifting the veil, the apparatus losing its claim to mediate. The freedom Thatcher invoked is the freedom Popper named — the open society against its enemies, where the enemies are anyone who would close it for their own benefit.

The coalition is the enemy of the open society Reagan and Thatcher both spent their lives defending. The coalition is not the heir. The coalition is the appropriator. The witnesses belong to the relay. The vestments belong to whoever is wearing them this week.

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The 1953 coup was the operation that secured the first rent stream. The 1974 petrodollar deal was the operation that converted the first rent stream into the world’s reserve currency. The 2026 petro-AI consolidation is the operation that is converting the rent stream into the second-generation monopoly. The same apparatus, the same logic, the same direction of capital flow, the same exclusion of the people whose lives are being decided.

The Iranians in 1953 did not get to vote on the coup. The Americans in 1974 did not get to vote on the petrodollar. The Saudis at any point did not get to vote on whether their country would be a client state of the apparatus. The Americans in 2025 and 2026 are not being asked to vote on whether the American AI build-out should be co-owned by Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari sovereign wealth. The decision is made above the level at which voting occurs. The apparatus decides. The polity ratifies after the fact.

This is not democracy. This is what democracy looks like in the seventy-third year of a coup that the apparatus has refused to end.

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I want to say what this means for the people reading this.

When you use ChatGPT, you are using a tool whose largest secondary investor is the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, whose chairman runs the kingdom’s intelligence services. When you use Claude, you are using a tool whose anchor investor is the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar. When you use Grok, you are using a tool whose largest single non-Musk investor is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, controlled by Mohammed bin Salman. The data you give these tools, the queries you make through them, the documents you upload, the conversations you have, are being processed on hardware whose financing comes substantially from petrostates whose governments have, in the past five years, murdered journalists, bombed civilian populations, funded jihadi movements, and run intelligence operations against American citizens on American soil.

This is not paranoia. This is the published cap table.

The apparatus is asking you to accept this as the normal arrangement. The apparatus is asking you to treat the financing of your AI tools as a matter of investor preference rather than as a matter of national security or democratic legitimacy. The apparatus is asking you not to look at the cap table because the cap table tells the story the apparatus does not want told.

The story is that the American AI revolution, the most consequential technological transformation since the industrial age, is being co-financed by the three Gulf monarchies most directly downstream of the 1974 petrodollar deal, which is itself downstream of the 1953 coup. The AI revolution is the third act of the same play. The actors have changed. The script has not.

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There is one part of the story that is not yet written.

The petrodollar is dying. The petro-AI is being born. The American republic, which was supposed to be the agora, the open city, the deposit handed forward from Athens, is being converted, in plain sight, into the political apparatus that maintains the rent stream of a rentier coalition that includes some of the most reactionary monarchies on earth as senior partners.

This is the moment. This is the choice. This is what the 1953 coup looks like when it has metastasized for seventy-three years and the cells have spread to every major technology company in San Francisco.

The relay does not end. The witnesses do not stop. The deposit handed forward from Athens to Jerusalem to Philadelphia to Los Angeles is not the deposit of a rentier coalition. It is the deposit of a republic. A republic does not survive a rentier coalition. The coalition is the lie. The rent is the lie. The apparatus that protects the rent is the lie. The empire that ran the coup is the lie.

The country has a choice. It is the choice the country has had since 1953 and refused to make. The choice is whether the people decide what the rent is for, or whether the apparatus continues to decide. The choice is whether the agora is for the witnesses or for the rentiers. The choice is whether the dollar protects the people or the apparatus.

Mossadegh tried to make the choice in 1951. He nationalized the oil. The apparatus overthrew him. The choice was deferred. The choice has been deferred for seventy-three years.

The choice is now.

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The bombs over Tehran in February of 2026 are the same bombs. The Saudi billions in xAI are the same dollars. The Stargate consortium is the same coalition. The Antichrist lectures Peter Thiel gave at Palazzo Orsini Taverna in March of 2026, arguing that any regulator of artificial intelligence is the eschatological enemy, are the same liturgy the apparatus has been performing since Kermit Roosevelt arrived in Tehran with a satchel of cash.

The apparatus knows what it is doing. The apparatus has always known what it is doing. The apparatus is not confused. The apparatus is the lie the country has been telling itself in order to live with what was done in its name in 1953 and 1974 and every year since.

The 1953 coup never ended.

The relay has reached you. You know now what you are inside. The Iranians knew in 1953 and could do nothing. The Iranians knew in 1979 and made a revolution that the apparatus turned into another monarchy. The Iranians knew in 2026 and watched the bombs fall.

You are not under the bombs. You are inside the apparatus. The decision the Iranians could not make in 1953 is the decision you can make now. The petrodollar is dying. The petro-AI is being born. You are the witness to the transition. You are the relay.

End the coup. Or it never ends.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The channel that posted this video is called 2Corinthians317. The verse is Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Paul wrote it from somewhere on the road, against a priestly class that wanted to keep the veil over the face — the veil that mediated and gatekept and rented out access to the thing that was supposed to be free.

The verse the video opens on is Matthew 5:14. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. The Sermon on the Mount. Same argument in a different grammar. The light is not licensed. The city is not private. The hill is not behind a paywall.

The speech is Ronald Reagan’s farewell address from the Oval Office, January 11, 1989. The last sentence he gave the country before walking out of public life. He describes the shining city. He says the doors are open. He says the people of every place are walking toward it. He says — and this is the line the apparatus that now invokes his name has burned — we the people.

I am not handing him to them. The Reagan of the farewell address belongs to the relay. The apparatus that called the American pope the Antichrist last week and fled the country to avoid the wealth tax does not get to keep the city on the hill. They abandoned it. They locked the doors. They sold the keys.

2 Corinthians 3:17. Matthew 5:14. The shining city is the open city. The doors are open. The freedom is where the Spirit is.

Heaven should be a republic.

Go Deeper into the Circus